research topics

Economic Mechanisms

Reputation mechanisms encourage fulfillment of promises, especially in contexts where legal enforcement of contracts is too expensive (e.g., for low-value transactions in an e-commerce setting). Studies of cooperation in simpler settings, such as the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, typically provide only a single choice for participants (cooperate or defect) and do not allow participants to select their partners. Laboratory experiments with reputation in a market context allow a richer range of behaviors since participants choose their trading partners so can react to poor reputation by ostracizing or offering worse prices (i.e., price discrimination) in addition to not fulfilling contracts (i.e., defecting).

• laboratory experiments comparing reputations based on different amounts of information about past behavior:
  K-Y. Chen and T. Hogg, Experimental Study of Reputation Mechanisms in an Exchange Economy, 2010
• online social networks can improve reputation mechanisms by providing implicit recommendations or filtering explicit recommendations of trustworthiness:
  T. Hogg, Security Challenges for Reputation Mechanisms using Online Social Networks, 2009

Information aggregation:

• using social networks to infer preferences in a population:
  T. Hogg, Inferring Preference Correlations from Social Networks, 2009
• identifying subgroups giving good predictions in an information aggregation laboratory experiment:
  K-Y. Chen and T. Hogg, Aggregating Diffuse Information with Subgroups, 2004

Theory and human-subject experiments illustrate the behavior of mechanisms using quantum information processing.