CORE Seminar: Jon Klein­berg

Many sys­tems involve the allo­ca­tion of rewards for achieve­ments, and these rewards pro­duce a set of incen­tives that in turn guide behav­ior. Such effects are vis­i­ble in many domains from every­day life, and they are increas­ingly form­ing a designed aspect of par­tic­i­pa­tory on-line sites through the use of badges and other reward sys­tems. We con­sider sev­eral aspects of the inter­ac­tion between rewards and incen­tives in the con­text of col­lec­tive effort, includ­ing a method for rea­son­ing about on-line user activ­ity in the pres­ence of badges, and a graph-theoretic frame­work for ana­lyz­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tion and other forms of behav­ior that are incon­sis­tent over time. The talk will be based on joint work with Ash­ton Ander­son, Dan Hut­ten­locher, Jure Leskovec, and Sigal Oren.