Faculty Seminar Series–Economics and Computation: Inseparable Perspectives

Most of my research career has been spent at the boundary of economics and computer science: bringing to bear economic principles on decentralized computation, and computational techniques on economic problems. Over time the interplay between these disciplines has grown in popularity, driven by Internet-Era research challenges as well as intellectual affinities between the fields. I argue that it is becoming untenable to ignore the economics of computation, or the computation in economics. This talk is an overview of the "econCS" enterprise, an attempt to motivate the problems addressed and survey the techniques and frameworks employed by researchers in this emerging community. It is heavily biased by my own research agenda and opinions.
Michael P. Wellman is Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 for his work in qualitative probabilistic reasoning and decision-theoretic planning. From 1988 to 1992, Wellman conducted research in these areas at the USAF's Wright Laboratory. For the past 19+ years, his research has focused on computational market mechanisms for distributed decision making and electronic commerce. As Chief Market Technologist for TradingDynamics, Inc. (now part of Ariba), he designed configurable auction technology for dynamic business-to-business commerce. Wellman previously served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom), and as Executive Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.