Keynote: On-Line Social Systems with Long-Range Goals

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 milestones and badges; and a graph-theoretic framework for analyzing procrastination and other forms of behavior that are inconsistent over time. The talk includes joint work with Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jure Leskovec, and Sigal Oren