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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EC 2014 accepted papers

The list of accepted papers for ACM EC 2014 has been posted.

PS: Since I accepted the intimidating invitation below, I’ve been thinking of what my first post should be about. Now I have to admit I took the easy way out. Thanks for letting me participate. I’ll try to think of something more original next time.

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Should technical errors disqualify conference papers?

Looking in my rearview mirror 

Guest post by Reshef Meir

Once upon a time (or so I’m told), the important publication venues were journals. Sure, there were conferences, but their main purpose was to present new findings to the community and to trigger discussions. A conference paper did not really “count”, and results were only considered valid after being published in a respectable journal, verified by its reviewers. Indeed, this is still the situation in some fields.

I have no intention to revive the discussion on the pros and cons of journals, but conferences proceedings in computer science, and in AGT in particular, are nowadays treated as publications for every purpose. They are considered reliable, are highly cited, and theorems are used as building blocks for newer results. We also want institutions and promotion committees to consider conference papers when looking at candidates.

The next sentence should be “…this progress was made possible due to great improvements in the review process of conferences”. But has it?

Almost half of the conference submissions I have personally reviewed [1] contained severe technical errors—where many of the erroneous submissions came from EC.  All EC submissions, I should say, were worthy, and would make at least a reasonable case for acceptance if not for the technical errors.

Somewhat surprisingly, I discovered that there is no consensus about rejecting papers once a technical error is spotted [2]. Often authors reply with a corrected version (sometimes weakening the propositions), or a proof sketch, or promise they would fix the proof. For some committee members, this is a satisfactory answer; others assert that the paper should be refereed based on the originally submitted version, and that technical correctness is a threshold condition for acceptance.

I am not arguing that technical correctness should be the only or the primary criterion for acceptance, but this is one criterion that I think there is currently a problem with. To initiate a discussion, here are the main arguments for acceptance/rejection as I perceive them.

Toward acceptance:

1)      It is not the reviewers’ job but the authors’ responsibility to verify the correctness of their results (an old debate, see e.g. here, p.3).

2)      Proofs are sometimes replaced with sketches or even omitted, so it is unreasonable (and perhaps impossible) to verify correctness anyway.

3)      Even in journals, errors are no big deal, since if results are important the error will eventually “float”.

4)      We should trust authors, as no one wants an embarrassing error under their name. [3]

5)      There is an opportunity cost incurred on the community for delaying the publication of interesting results.

Toward rejection:

a)      If errors are found, a corrected version can be submitted to either a different conference or the next meeting of the same conference. Authors should not be given the credit for correcting the paper and resubmitting it, since we know it cannot be properly reviewed.

b)      Accepting revised versions from some authors may be unfair toward others. Also, why not submit a corrected version with better motivation, references, or added results?

c)       If an error is found, this is an indication that there might be other hidden errors, and that authors should better prepare their paper for publication.

d)      There are many non/lightly refereed venues (Arxiv, workshops) for propagating results quickly. It is hard to claim that results in CS do not propagate fast enough.

e)      While authors doubtlessly prefer to publish error-free papers, other tasks and priorities may come before verification. Papers usually do not go under major changes between acceptance and the camera-ready version. From my experience as an author though, papers often significantly improve between submissions.

f)       Low tolerance for errors will incentivize authors to invest effort in finding their own mistakes prior to submission.

All in all, I agree that the best verification is indeed by the authors themselves, and that it is the authors’ responsibility to publish error-free papers. However I do think there is a problem. I will fully admit that my own papers are not free from errors, and unfortunately some of them have been only found after publication.

One possible solution is a revision of the reviewing process that will put more emphasis on verifying correctness, making another step in the hybridization of journals and conferences. For example, adding more time for the review and allowing authors to submit revisions in particular cases. As such changes are costly, a simpler solution is to make it clear that non-trivial errors will result in rejection unless there are unusual circumstances (like a ground-breaking result that can be easily fixed). The point of this strict line is not to be an adversarial  reviewer, but rather to ensure that authors have not just the capability and the responsibility—but also the incentive—to properly verify their own work.

So, should the review process change? Should an article with errors be accepted or rejected?

---

[1] Aggregating 20 submissions over the period 2009-2013, from AAMAS, SAGT, WINE, AAAI, IJCAI, and ACM-EC. Clearly this is not statistically significant at any rate, but may still indicate a problem. Of course, even in published journal papers errors are common, and I have seen estimations that between 10% and 30% of published papers contain non-trivial errors. Unfortunately I could not find any trusted source but see e.g. here and here.

[2]  By “severe technical error” I mean either that a proposition is wrong, or that large chunks of the proof should be rewritten.

[3] Indeed, some people are quite embarrassed if an error is discovered even before publication. In contrast, Lamport (in Sec.4.4 and in general) seems to be skeptical about the attitude of computer scientists towards their published errors.

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IPAM workshop on AGT

The institute of Pure and Applied Math (IPAM) at UCLA is having a workshop on Algorithmic Game Theory on January 10-14, 2011 with an impressive list of confirmed speakers.  Registration by November 15th is recommended.

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ICS 2011 deadline approaching

The deadline for ICS 2011 is near: August 2nd.  The conference itself will take place in Beijing on January 7-9, 2011.  From the website:

Innovations in Computer Science (ICS)  is a new conference in theoretical computer science (TCS), broadly construed. ICS seeks to promote research that carries a strong conceptual message (e.g., introducing a new concept or model, opening a new line of inquiry within traditional or cross-disciplinary areas, or introducing new techniques or new applications of known techniques). ICS welcomes all submissions, whether aligned with current TCS research directions or deviating from them.

The inaugural year of the conference has drawn much discussion (here, here, here, here, here, and my own here), has had many cs/econ-related papers, and seems to have been quite interesting.  This year too, the conference offers financial support:

ITCS will provide full support for one author of each accepted paper, including air ticket (economy airfare at the minimum of the amount), hotel lodging (up to 4 nights), and registration fee.

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WINE 2010

Amin Saberi asked me to post the following announcement for WINE 2010:

The Workshop on Internet & Network Economics (WINE) is an
interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas and results arising in the algorithmic and economic analysis of Internet and WWW.  WINE 2010 is co-located with the 7th Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph (WAW 2010) from December 13 to 17 in Stanford University. The submission deadline  for regular and short papers is July 30th, 2010. For more information, see http://wine2010.stanford.edu .

I am particularly impressed with the graphics of the program committee web page.  (Well, the program committee composition is impressive as well).

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FOCS 2010 accepted papers

This list of FOCS 2010 accepted papers (82/270) has been published: pure list, with abstracts, with many links to papers.  AGT/E related ones:

• The Geometry of Manipulation – a Quantitative Proof of the Gibbard Satterthwaite Theorem [arXiv]
  Authors: Marcus Isaksson, Guy Kindler and Elchanan Mossel
• Frugal Mechanism Design via Spectral Techniques [arXiv]
  Authors: Ning Chen, Edith Elkind, Nick Gravin and Fedor Petrov
• Sequential Rationality in Cryptographic Protocols
  Authors: Ronen Gradwohl, Noam Livne and Alon Rosen
• Frugal and Truthful Auctions for Vertex Covers, Flows, and Cuts [arXiv]
  Authors: David Kempe, Mahyar Salek and Cristopher Moore
• Black-Box Randomized Reductions in Algorithmic Mechanism Design
  Authors: Shaddin Dughmi and Tim Roughgarden
• Pure and Bayes-Nash Price of Anarchy for Generalized Second Price Auction [pdf]
  Authors: Renato Paes Leme and Eva Tardos
• Budget Feasible Mechanisms [arXiv]
  Author: Yaron Singer

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SAGT 2010 accepted papers

The list of accepted papers (with abstracts) for SAGT 2010 (to be held in Athens, October 18-20) has been posted.  Judging from a quick look at the abstracts, the paper quality seems to quite good.

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COMSOC accepted papers

COMSOC 2010 has published the list of accepted papers.  True to the conference’s non-archival relaxed stance the acceptance rate was very high: 40/57.

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TCS Conferences — again

The theoretical computer science community is off to another round of discussions regarding its conference system.  Lance Fortnow, ex-officio as SIGACT chair, put forward a suggestion of reforming STOC, a drastic change that may alter the whole conferences-as-top-publications culture of the field (as Lance has previously suggested doing).  He set up a blog with the proposal itself as well as many responses — mostly negative ones. Other recent related posts are here, here, here, and here (added 21/6: and here and here.)

While I like the CS conference system, I still think that a change is needed in the pan-TCS conferences as the field is getting bigger and deeper. Like most others who commented on the proposal, I doubt that the suggested new format has enough value to attract attendees.  As many suggested, I would start by co-locating with other related conferences, as was done this year (with CCC and EC).

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