STIET has made substantial contributions to multidisciplinary advances spanning social, economic, computer and engineering sciences. Our original program was broadly defined to cover widely ranging multidisciplinary investigations of infrastructure for electronic transactions. We now will consolidate on a coherent intellectual core that has proven to be our most important development: incentive-centered design (ICD) for information and communication systems. System performance depends on the strategic behavior of autonomous, self- interested humans; therefore we draw on theories of rational decision making, game-theoretic models of strategic interaction, and economic, psychological and other social science theories of motivation to form a principled grounding for system design. We will apply our advances in ICD methods to the design of user-contributed open-access content in social computing environments and to distributed allocation problems facing cyberinfrastructure development.

STIET Research in the News

• 7/24/07 STIET has received a highly-competitive five-year NSF grant renewal for our research and training program.We will implement major innovations including a new leading-edge multidisciplinary research program emerging from our prior work, called incentive-centered design; a new summer research team program for undergraduate and master's students from under-represented groups to stimulate recruiting into graduate programs and to simultaneously enhance our PhD training; and an expansion of the research and training program to Wayne State University to disseminate our training success, and to strengthen our recruiting efforts.

• June 11-15, 2007 STIET Director Jeff MacKie-Mason was General Chair for the 2007 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'07) in San Diego. STIET faculty and graduate students presenting research at the conference included Yan Chen, Stan Dimitrov, Yagil Engel, Tom Finholt, Daniel Grosu, John Lin, Rahul Sami, Kan Takeuchi, Mike Wellman.

• Former STIET fellow, Thede Loder and his start-up company, Boxbe, are in a March article in The Economist about online advertising and solutions to the problem of junk email. See the Economist article (requires subscription) on 3/8/07.

• June 2006: STIET hosted the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'06) on June 11-15, 2006.

• STIET research on spam by STIET fellows Thede Loder, Rick Wash Professor Marshall Van Alstyne hits the news. Their paper, An Economic Solution to the Spam Problem was presented at the MIT Spam Conference 2004 and ACM EC'04. Also see the Wall Street Journal article (requires subscription) on 1/15/04.

STIET fellow Derek Hansen published an article in JAMA about an Internet filtering project in work with Dr. Caroline Richardson, Professor Paul Resnick, Holly A. Derry, and Victoria Rideout called "Does Pornography-Blocking Software Block Access to Health Information on the Internet?" in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dec. 11, 2002. 288(22) 2887-2894.