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Hello
TUX!
A
reminder that today we have a Member Presentation by Prof. Ashton
Anderson.
We
look forward to seeing you there!
Ali,
Daniel, and Tovi
TUX
Member Presentation: Prof. Ashton Anderson
October
5, 2018. DGP Lab, Department of Computer Science at
U of T @ 40 St. George Street Room 5166
Lunch
reception begins at 12:30 pm. Presentation begins at
1:00 pm.
The Design of Social Incentives
An increasingly common feature of online
communities and social media sites is a mechanism for
rewarding user achievements based on a system of social
incentives, such as badges. Badges are given to users
for particular contributions to a site, such as
performing a certain number of actions of a given
type. In this talk, I will speak about how badges can
influence and steer user behavior on a site—leading both
to increased participation and to changes in the mix of
activities a user pursues on the site. I’ll introduce a
formal model for reasoning about user behavior in the
presence of badges, and in particular for analyzing the
ways in which badges can steer users to change their
behavior. To evaluate the main predictions of our model,
we study the use of badges and their effects on the
widely used Stack Overflow question-answering site, and
find evidence that their badges steer behavior in ways
closely consistent with the predictions of our model. We
then investigate the problem of how to optimally
place badges in order to induce particular user
behaviors. Several robust design principles emerge from
our framework that could potentially aid in the design
of incentives for a broad range of sites.
Finally, I’ll report on a large-scale deployment
of badges as incentives for engagement in a MOOC,
including randomized experiments in which the
presentation of badges was varied across
sub-populations. We find that badges significantly
increased student engagement, with the magnitude of the
increase varying with the saliency of
the badge presentation.
Bio
Ashton Anderson (University of Toronto) is
an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Toronto, where he is also a Faculty
Affiliate with the Vector Institute and a Research
Fellow in Behavioural Economics. He received his PhD
from Stanford University in 2015 and completed a
postdoctoral appointment at Microsoft Research NYC in
2017. His research in computational social science
focuses on questions in the increasingly vital
intersection of data and society. His work has appeared
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Sociological Science, and The Web Conference.
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OUR
SPONSORS:
TUX is made possible by the support of
our sponsors, Steven Sanders, Autodesk,
University of Toronto Department of
Computer Science, and MaRS.
About
MaRS: MaRS is the one of the
world’s largest urban innovation hubs—a place for
collaboration, creativity and entrepreneurship.
Located in the heart of Toronto’s research district,
MaRS provides the space, training, talent and
networks required to commercialize important
discoveries and launch and grow Canadian startups.
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