This Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site provides a diverse group of promising students with a summer research experience in order to foster their intellectual growth as scientists and provide a stepping stone to a rewarding career at the intersection of social sciences and information technology, with a focus on incentive-centered design (ICD), an approach to designing systems in a way that aligns individual incentives with system goals.
Students will participate in research projects in several areas of ICD, including the design and implementation of trading agents for complex automated markets, behavioral experiments to understand the factors that motivate human behavior and test incentive mechanisms, the use of social motivators to promote healthy behaviors, and the analysis of strategic properties of all-pay auctions and crowdsourcing contests. REU students are fully integrated into a research group that matches their intellectual interests and work as independently as possible with faculty mentors who excel in supervising undergraduate research.
Broader Impact: This program aims to attract a diverse group of students to the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of incentive-centered design, thereby expanding the pool of students interested in research careers across multiple disciplines. The research work will be augmented by an extensive array of other educational and collegial activities that will allow students to view their research experience in a broader context, build a network of professional contacts, and develop professional skills in a scientific environment.
