Professor Yan Chen New STIET Director

(May 2008) School of Information Professor Yan Chen has been named the new director of the STIET doctoral training program at U-M effective July 1, 2008. STIET is a multidisciplinary program run jointly with Wayne State University that applies incentive-centered design (ICD) to research and develop systems that improve the human experience of the Internet.

"Yan Chen joined STIET in its first year and has been one of the group's most productive members, responsible for a lot of our success," says outgoing STIET director Jeff MacKie-Mason, the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science.

"She is a terrific researcher, a great advisor to students, and a leader. I am so pleased that she has agreed to become the second program director for STIET, and I know the program's future is bright as a result."

Chen is also coordinator of the incentive-centered design specialization in SI's Master of Science in Information program. She works in the field of incentive-centered design and experimental economics, which uses laboratory and field experiments to test the properties of various incentive-compatible mechanisms.

Chen's work looks at the design of robust economic mechanisms when agents (such as human beings) are not perfectly rational. Mechanism design theory assumes people will act rationally and can reach an equilibrium quickly in an economic situation. Her research investigates how people really learn in such situations, what types of mechanisms aid that learning, and whether such learning can eventually lead to the states of equilibrium predicted by theory. This work has been applied to the selection of congestion allocation mechanisms for distributed networks and mechanisms for public goods provision.

Her recent work synthesizes economic and social psychological theories to improve contributions to online communities, and to investigate efficient and fair allocation mechanisms of indivisible resources to individuals, such as school choice and house allocation, which have the potential to influence important public policies.

Founded in 2001, the STIET program recently received a second $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its operations for the next five years.

"STIET grew out of a modest research collaboration between two faculty and their students into a two-campus, multi-department program with over 35 doctoral fellows and many faculty actively participating," says MacKie-Mason.
 

STIET Program Manager, Karen Woollams