SIGecom Announcement: EC 2020 will be virtual

As many of you have probably anticipated, due to concerns regarding the novel coronavirus COVID-19, the 2020 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2020) will be held virtually.

This change of format will of course present us with difficult challenges, but we believe it will offer exciting new opportunities as well.  (And not to worry, your opportunity to attend EC in Budapest is just deferred to 2021.)

The SIGecom Executive Committee has appointed and will serve on a Virtual Transition Team that additionally includes the following new conference officers:

• Virtual General Chair: Jason Hartline
• Virtual Local Chair: Yannai Gonczarowski
• Virtual Global Outreach Chairs: Rediet Abebe and Eric Sodomka

This team is working with the EC 2020 organizing committee and EC 2020 PC chairs to put together a plan that leverages the opportunities of the virtual format to the fullest extent. Though these plans are still in the works, we have identified the following “minimal commitment” for authors of accepted papers to the main EC conference: at least one author will need to

• register for the conference;
• be available virtually on the conference dates (July 14-16);
• provide a camera-ready paper or abstract by the camera-ready deadline;
• provide a pre-recorded talk presenting the paper two weeks in advance (by June 28).

We are optimistic that, while a virtual EC may lack some of the positive features of a classical conference, the format will also provide opportunities that improve on the classical experience.  As with any conference there will be opportunities to participate beyond the “minimal commitment.”  We hope that speakers and participants will join in other activities, which may include preview sessions for talks before the conference proper, watch parties for speakers and attendees, and mechanisms for reaching a wider audience with the technical program. With many academic interactions moving virtual, the barriers to collaboration with distant colleagues have lowered, and we hope that EC 2020 will kindle and rekindle global collaborations.

Further details about these activities as well as the minimal requirements will be circulated by June 1.

Tutorial speakers and workshop organizers will receive separate emails from the Tutorial and Workshop Chairs about plans for moving these events online.

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Call for Papers: The 2nd Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation

https://sites.google.com/view/behavioralec2020/
July 17, 2020, Budapest, Hungary
At the 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC ’20)

**In the event the in-person conference does not happen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will hold the workshop virtually.

SUBMISSIONS DUE May 18, 2020, 11:59pm PDT.

Call for Papers: the 2nd Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation

We solicit research contributions and participants for the 2nd Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation, to be held in conjunction with the Twenty-First ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC ’20).

Based on the successful workshop last year, we aim to bring together again researchers and practitioners from diverse subareas of EC, who are interested in the intersection of human economic behavior and computation, to share new results and to discuss future directions for behavioral research related to economics and computation. It will be a full-day workshop, and will feature invited speakers, contributed paper presentations and a panel discussion.

The gap between rationality-based analysis that assumes utility-maximizing agents and actual human behavior in the real world has been well recognized in economics, psychology and other social sciences. In recent years, there has been growing interest in conducting behavioral research across many of the sub-areas related to economics and computation to address this gap. In one direction, some of these studies leverage insights on human decision making from the behavioral economics and psychology literature to study economic and computational systems with human users. In the other direction, computational tools are used to study and gain insights on human behavior and a data-driven approach is used to learn behavior models from user-generated data.

The 2nd Behavioral EC workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, including but not limited to computer science, economics, psychology and sociology, to exchange ideas related to behavioral research in economics and computation. In addition to sharing new results, we hope the workshop will foster a lively discussion of future directions and methodologies for behavioral research related to economics and computation as well as fruitful cross-pollination of behavioral economics, cognitive psychology and computer science.

We welcome studies at the intersection of economic behavior and computation from a rich set of theoretical, experimental and empirical perspectives. The topics of interest for the workshop are behavioral research in all settings covered by EC, including but not limited to:

• Behavioral mechanism design and applied mechanism design
• Boundedly-rational models of economic decision making
• Empirical studies of human economic behavior
• Model evaluation and selection based on behavioral data
• Data-driven modelling
• Online prediction markets, online experiments, and crowdsourcing platforms
• Hybrid human-machine systems
• Models and experiments about social considerations (e.g. fairness and trust) in decision making
• Methods for behavioral EC: information aggregation, probability elicitation, quality control

Submission Instructions

Submission deadline: May 18, 2020, 11:59pm PDT.

Notification: June 11, 2020

All submissions will be peer reviewed. We will give priority to new (unpublished) research papers but will also consider ongoing research and recently published papers that may be of interest to the workshop audience. For submissions of published papers, authors must clearly state the venue of publication. Position papers and panel discussion proposals are also welcome. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, significance, originality, research contribution, and likelihood to catalyze discussion.

Submissions can be in any format and any length. We recommend the EC submission format. The workshop will not have archival proceedings but will post accepted papers on the workshop website. At least one author of each accepted paper will be expected to attend and present their findings at the workshop.

Submissions should be uploaded to Easychair no later than May 18th, 2020, 11:59pm PDT.

Organizing Committee

Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Dan Goldstein, Microsoft Research
Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia
Shengwu Li, Harvard University
Gali Noti, Hebrew University

More Information

For more information or questions, visit the workshop website:
https://sites.google.com/view/behavioralec2020/
or email the organizing committee: behavioralec2020@easychair.org

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