Advancing the Field of CS+Economics

Northwestern Computer Science will have a strong presence at the Twenty-Fourth Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'23) on July 9 to 12 at King's College London, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom).

Northwestern Engineering’s Jason Hartline and Larry Samuelson, A. Douglas Melamed Professor of Economics and professor of management at Yale University, are the program co-chairs of EC'23, which is an annual forum for advances in theory, empirics, and applications at the interface of economics and computation.

A leader in CS+Economics research, Hartline is a professor of computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering, the director of Northwestern’s Online Markets Lab, and a founding codirector of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning. He applies design and analysis methodologies from computer science to explain and improve the behavior and outcomes of complex economic systems.

“We had an exceptional team, especially program co-chair Larry Samuelson, working on the program for this year’s conference," Hartline said. "We had 622 submissions and the program committee of 301 researchers eventually accepted 162 papers to be presented in London. A main innovation in the process this year was a synchronous program committee meeting which met virtually for 25 hours over which each submitted paper was presented and debated.”

Several faculty members and PhD students across three Northwestern schools will present papers and posters at the event. In addition, a Northwestern alum and former faculty member will be recognized with significant honors at the EC’23 awards ceremony.

Northwestern Engineering alum Modibo Camara (PhD ’22), will be acknowledged for receiving the ACM SIGecom 2022 Doctoral Dissertation Award. Camara, who earned his PhD in economics, was jointly advised by Hartline and Eddie Dekel, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Nicole Immorlica, currently a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and formerly an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern Engineering from 2008 to 2013, will be presented with an ACM SIGecom 2023 Test of Time Award, the association’s annual honor recognizing authors of influential papers at the intersection of economics and computation.

The paper, titled “Marriage, Honesty, and Stability,” (SODA, 2005) was co-authored by Mohammad Mahdian at Google Research, and is recognized " for explaining an apparent gap between the theory and practice of matching markets."

Immorlica is also a keynote speaker at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference 2023, which precedes EC’23.

“Northwestern had a very strong showing of papers accepted to the program,” Hartline said. “The conference has been encouraging submissions by economists for many years, and it was really great to see many papers from the economics department and Kellogg submitted and many of them selected by the committee for inclusion in the program. I was not involved in the decisions for these papers.”

Northwestern contributions to the EC’23 technical program include the following papers:

• “Robust Contracts: A Revealed Preference Approach” — Nemanja Antic, assistant professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg, and George Georgiadis, associate professor of strategy at Kellogg
• “Drivers of Digital Attention: Evidence from a Social Media Experiment” — Guy Aridor, assistant professor of marketing and Donald P. Jacobs Scholar at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management
• “The Economics of Recommender Systems: Evidence from a Field Experiment on MovieLens” — Guy Aridor (Northwestern University), Duarte Goncalves (University College London), Daniel Kluver (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Ruoyan Kong (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), and Joseph Konstan (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
• “Comparing Screening Devices” — Piotr Dworczak, associate professor of economics at Weinberg; Mohammad Akbarpour (Stanford University); and Frank Yang (Stanford University)
• “Corporate Culture and Organizational Fragility” — Benjamin Golub, professor of economics at Weinberg and (by courtesy) professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering; Matthew Elliott (Cambridge University); and Mathieu V. Leduc (Paris School of Economics)
• “Equity Incentives in Networked Teams” — Benjamin Golub (Northwestern University); Anant Shah, a PhD student in computer science at Northwestern Engineering coadvised by Hartline and Golub; and Krishna Dasaratha (Boston University)
• “Principal Trading Arrangements: Optimality under Temporary and Permanent Price Impact” — Joshua Mollner, associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg; Markus Baldauf (University of British Columbia); and Christoph Frei (University of Alberta)
• “Reputation Effects under Short Memories” — Harry Pei, assistant professor of economics at Weinberg