User talk:Jmc242/incentive-centered design

This article is part of an educational assignment. The article will be posted to Wikipedia as a standalone page on October 4, 2012. The three members of our group Raisa, Daniel, Javier, will be working on developing the content of this article and will be happy to accept any feedback or advice regarding the article's improvement. Rr442 (talk) 18:38, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Topic
Why should incentive-centered design be a Wikipedia article?

Incentive-centered design (ICD) is an interesting topic because the different components system design is quite a popular topic in the world of technology, and ICD is gaining interest my various research areas. ICD is crucial to modern information systems because the performance of these system is based on the choices and actions users take when using them. Oftentimes, there can be a disconnect between system goals and users' interests, leading to inefficiency in the system. It is important to close the gap between individual interests and system goals so that systems can benefit users and achieve better results.


 * This is a very good topic. Also see on Jeff Mackie-Mason's website a link to Nobel Prize laureates who contributed to ICD - this might be of special interest to the readers and show the distinctive notability of the article. LeshedInstructor (talk) 21:16, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Article sections
'''What sections are you planning to write? How do you make sure the article is comprehensive and feasible within the time frame and resources you have?'''
 * Overview
 * History
 * Details
 * Current Research
 * Practical Applications
 * Commerical Products
 * Other Applications
 * Future Applications
 * References


 * You need to justify further why you chose to put in these sections and what you plan to write in each one of them. You can possibly add sections about incentive theory as the background of ICD and about influential people - researchers and professionals in this domain. LeshedInstructor (talk) 21:16, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Other article elements
'''What other elements are you going to put in the article - side box, images, etc.? Where are you going to obtain the images or information for the side box?'''
 * Pictures:
 * Examples of Incentive Centered Design:
 * Nike+ & MyFitness Pal
 * XBox Achievements
 * Educational Kids Games

We will be obtaining these images from the various sources that are listed below, after obtaining permission to use the images if necessary.


 * Fair enough. Make sure you follow the Wikipedia guidelines for image use, otherwise you might get some Wikipedians angry. LeshedInstructor (talk) 21:16, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Division of labor
What will each group member do?
 * Primary Roles:
 * Raisa - Write article content
 * Daniel - Research existing content, edit article content
 * Javier - Technical work (i.e., setting up the Wikipedia page, formatting the layout etc.), edit article content

Overview (Raisa)
The overview section will provide an introduction to the article on Incentive-Centered Design (ICD) and summarize some of the key aspects and ideas behind ICD. It will provide a general description of ICD, familiarize the reader of the context and discuss why ICD is notable.

Some main point thats will be mentioned are:
 * ICD is "the science of designing systems or institutions that align participants’ (individual) incentives with overall system (social) goals" (http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~jmm/archives/2006/02/what_is_incenti.html)
 * ICD is often considered when designing systems to ensure that they can induce truthfulness, cooperation, volunteerism, high-quality effort or other desirable behaviors from users. ICD is important for modern information systems because the performance of a system depends heavily on "the strategic choices users make when interacting with the system and with each other, yet mismatch between individual interests and system goals is pervasive" (http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~jmm/archives/2006/02/what_is_incenti.html). In return, systems and institutions can see vast improvements in the quality of responses they get from users. (http://stiet.si.umich.edu/)
 * ICD analyzes "individual motivations for strategic behavior, drawing on economic, psychological, and sociological theories, and combine these with the design and engineering sciences of artificial intelligence, software, operations research and networking" (http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~jmm/archives/2006/02/what_is_incenti.html)

Proposed text for this section: Incentive-centered design (ICD) is the science of designing a system or institution according to the alignment of individual and user incentives with the goals of the system. Using ICD, system designers can observe systematic and predictable tendencies in users in response to motivators to provide or manage incentives to induce a greater amount and more valuable participation (REFERENCE: Lian Jian and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. "Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content", in M. Peitz and J. Waldfogal, eds., The Oxford Handbook of The Digital Economy (Oxford University Press, 2012)). ICD is often considered when designing a system to induce desireable behaviors from users, such as participation and cooperation. It draws from principles in various areas such as economics, psycology, sociology, design, and engineering. ICD has been gaining attention in research communities due to the role it can play in helping systems benefit their users and ultimately achieve better results (http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~jmm/archives/2006/02/what_is_incenti.html ). Rr442 (talk) 22:45, 27 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Good start. To improve notability, make sure there are additional sources besides those from U Michigan.LeshedInstructor (talk) 02:02, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

History (Daniel)
In 1996, the Nobel Prize of Economics was awarded to William Vickrey and James Mirrlees for their work in "The Economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information", which was a core issue addressed by the theory of mechanism design. The theory of mechanism design was an antecedent to Incentive-Centered Design, and in October 15, 2007, Roger Myerson, Leonard Hurwicz and Eric Maskin received the Nobel Prize of Economics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their contributions to that theory. http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~jmm/archives/2007/10/nobel_prize_to.html? Leonard Hurwicz was the founder of the theory of mechanism design, which is a branch in economics that deals with game theory. In mechanism design, designers try to satisfy design goals in specific sets of games by setting outcome functions and message space of the game. The idea of designing "mechanisms", or sets of institutional participation rules, in order to achieve the designer's goals for a system, is a core concept for ICD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

In 2001, the STIET program (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) received a grant to fund for doctoral fellowships and a multidisciplinary program for the University of Michigan. The program aimed to train, research, and outreach to modern information systems through an Incentive-Centered Design approach. The participants in the program composed of doctoral students and also faculty members of the universities. In 2004, Paul Resnick, one of the four faculty members in the STIET research group of Michigan coined the phrase "Incentive-centered Design" to describe the type of work they did. In 2007, Wayne State University joined the University of Michigan to focus the program on Incentive-centered Design, and the STIET program received a five-year renewal grant that allowed for research in incentive-centered design. http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/about/STIETHistory

Interdisciplinary Concepts
Incentive-centered design branches from various areas and can be applied to a multitude of systems and concepts. It is closely related to User-Centered Design in that it takes user's wants, needs, and limitations during the design process for a product. Additionally, ICD is connected to Human-Computer Interaction since it involves the conjunction of humans and machines and how the two can mend together well. In particular, ICD blends together the goals of the user and the goals of the system so that the user can have a pleasant and valuable experience while using the system, and the system can give the user what they need and ultimately become more aware and responsive to varying needs. ICD also borrows from the Theory of Incentives. Conflicting objectives and decentralized information are two of the main components of the Theory of Incentives (http://219.219.191.244:1980/upload/chanjing/200811113173553049.pdf). ICD works to understand the objectives of the user and the system and combine and process information so that both parties obtain optimal results.

Information Security
Information Security is the concept of protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access and use. Incentive-centered design can assist in bringing into consideration the errors that humans can make when using a system. These errors could potentially lead to weaknesses in the system that can be taken advantage of by attackers. With ICD, a system can guide a user into providing appropriate and adequate information to prevent system weaknesses. A simple example would be the generation of passwords. By providing users tips, motivation and feedback on the passwords that they choose, systems can ensure that user accounts have a significantly decreased chance of getting attacked. (http://static.usenix.org/event/hotsec06/tech/full_papers/wash/wash.pdf). Rr442 (talk) 20:57, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

User-Generated Content
User-generated content, in simple terms, refers to media content that are created by users that are made publicly available on the internet. Incentives for users to contribute to user-generated content would be receiving recognition for their work, connecting with others, and self-expression. https://edit.ethz.ch/im/education/FS09/iotsem09_proceedings.pdf#page=28 Examples would include users uploading their own videos on the Youtube platform, making contributions to Wikipedia, posting reviews on a website, etc. User-generated content has three requirements. One is the publication requirement, and the second is the creative effort requirement - users must add their own original creative effort and value into their work. The final requirement is that the creation is outside of professional routines and practices - most user-generated content is non-professional and have no relation with anything institutional or commercial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-generated_content

Reputation Systems
Everything has a reputation - goods, services, companies, service providers, etc., and by basing on the collection of opinions of other entities on those things, the reputation system uses an algorithm to generate reputation scores for those things. Reputation systems are similar to recommendation systems - purchasing decisions of goods and services are influenced by the reputation scores of those goods and services, and goods with high reputation scores will attract more buyers. Examples would include Amazon and eBay, where customers who purchase the item are able to rate and review the quality of the product. The cumulative ratings would be displayed for the product, indicating its quality and popularity. A relation to incentive-centered design would be that if sellers on eBay have a high reputation, then other users would be inclined to buy from them or if the item itself has high ratings, users will be more likely to go for that item. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=355112.355122

Social Computing
Social Computing concerns the intertwining of computational systems and social behavior. Social computing entails a high level of community formation, user content creation, and collective action. Peer-to-peer networks, open source communities, and wikis are all examples of forms of social computing (http://crec.mccombs.utexas.edu/attachments/105_Social_Computing_An_Overview.pdf). In such areas, incentives are provided in the form of respect and recognition for users who provide high quality content and contributions. As a result of these contributions, the system overall becomes of higher quality. Rr442 (talk) 21:27, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Recommender Systems
Recommender Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system) attempt to predict the 'rating' or 'preference' a user would have of a particular item based on either attributes of the item or attributes of the social network related to the user. These recommendation systems can be seen in places such as social networks suggesting new friends, shopping sites recommending related clothing, etc.

The Netflix Recommender System is designed to incentivize participation from the user, aligning the systems interests with the users interests. The users want to find content they are interested in, and Netflix wants to be able to provide better recommendations to their users. The star system that Netflix provides allows for the both parties to benefit.

Online Auction Design
An online auction is essentially an auction on the internet. Different formats range from descending auctions to sealed-bid auctions. A huge variety of goods and services can be sold in online auctions, and there are hundreds of different websites that are all for online auctions. A well known example would be eBay, where users on the site can sell their own personal items for other to buy. In relation to incentive-centered design, sites such as eBay allow users to rate the product the purchased. Sellers and goods that have large numbers of high ratings will attract more buyers compared with unreliable sellers and poor quality goods for sale in the auction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_auction Rr442 (talk) 20:24, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Algorithmic Mechanism Design
Insert text here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_mechanism_design Rr442 (talk) 00:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Current Research (Daniel)
Current research is being conducted by the University of Michigan and Wayne State University through their STIET program. The program has made significant contributions to the field of Incentive-Centered Design, and a lot the research involves game theory models, strategic interaction, and rational decision making. http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/about For example, in July 10, 2008, Rahul Sami and Stanko Dimitrov researched bluffing in Prediction Markets (In the Prediction Market, participants bet on the outcome of the market). Another would be in July 2009, Michael Wellman and Patrick Jordan both designed the Ad Auction game, and they both developed the strategies and trading interfaces for the game as well. In 2010, Robert Reynolds and Leonard Kinniard-Heether worked on to train a Neural network controller to play the video game SuperMario through the use of the Cultural Algorithm Toolkit system (CAT 3.0) http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/research

Practical Applications (Javier)
WHAT IT IS: This section is about the practical/current applications of incentive-centered design. It will include examples and applications of the technique in existing products/systems. JUSTIFICATION: This section is necessary to give the reader real world examples, so they can get a better understanding of the abstract concept.


 * Nike+iPod Sports Kit
 * This sports kit from Nike comes with a receiver that attaches to your iPod or iPhone and a transmitter that is placed in the sole of the shoe. The kit is a running measurement kit - it measures the time of the user's workout, the distance ran, the amount of calories burned, speed, etc. The example of user-incentive design in this system is that when users reach milestones in goal-oriented workouts or achieve personal records, there will be pre-recorded audio feedback from famous sports athletes acknowledging the achievement and also congratulating the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike%2BiPod


 * Ford Hybrid Car
 * In the 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrid sedans, the instrumental panels are designed so that the screen shows the cloudy sky and the grass. When drivers are driving in a fuel-efficient manner, then the green leaves that appear on the panels will multiply accordingly. This goal-oriented display could motivate the driver to motor in a more fuel-efficient manner. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/environment/2008-10-28-Ford-hybrid-fuel-efficiency_N.htm


 * Class grading system in University of Indiana
 * Inspired by games such as World of Warcraft, professors in the University of Indiana changed their course grading system so that it appears to be like a quest in a video game. Students will start off with 0 experience points, and class requirements such as homework, class attendance, exams, and projects are turned into "quests", "fighting monsters", "crafting", and "joining a guild". Lee Sheldon, a university course coordinator, found that student interest and performance increased after such change in the college coursework grading system. http://elder-geek.com/2010/03/indiana-university-prof-changes-grades-to-quests/


 * "XBOX Achievements"
 * In XBOX games, by playing a certain way in the game, players can unlock XBOX achievements throughout the game. Each achievement is different and requires/challenges the user to complete a certain task. Other games in different platforms such as the Playstation also use achievements to challenge players, but the XBOX 360 by Microsoft was the first to introduce the idea in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_(video_gaming)

Future Applications (Javier)
There are current trends in computing that can be seen today that will shape the future of comuting. As referenced in the TED Talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html), there exists a handful of important trends in technology and society:


 * Early Incentive Systems - The points and membership programs that exist at commercial establisments (Starbucks, frequent flyer miles)
 * Shrinking, Cheap & Mobile Computing - Phones are becoming more and more powerful and portable, allowing us to do things we couldn't dream about in the past.
 * Interconnectivity - With shrinking computers there comes a network of devices that are always present and connected.

These trends can lead to different manifestations of Incentive-Centered Design:


 * Advertising - with interconnected, disposable computing coming along, touch-screen cereal boxes can become a reality. The games on them could be interactive and multiplayer, encouraging you to continue to buy and eat a certain brand of cereal - and even encouraging you to have your friends eat it too - just so you can play the same games.
 * Government & Community - Incentives can be built around how often you ride the bus, triggering a Commuter Tax Benefit, or some sort of Health Care Prevention benefit. We could also track your carbon footprint based on activity, movement, and tax the individual accordingly.

Observer's Feedback
I'm not that familiar with incentive-centered design, so I think I can tell you if your page is helpful/clear to uneducated readers. So far, you guys seem to have an organization that would facilitate understanding. By starting with the abstract concept and its history, and then moving to real-world examples, you should be able to convey the idea of incentive-centered design effectively. It might be helpful to have diagrams that present the concept visually. Youtube videos that describe abstract concepts like incentive-centered design sometimes take advantage of those kinds of visual aids. Joey236 (talk) 03:19, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Great progress guys. For the "Future Applications" section, is the stuff listed the product of just you guys brainstorming about what ICD could be used for, or did you come across mentions of these things in your research? If its the latter then you should add footnotes to the relevant references after each application is mentioned. You could also add a "See Also" section with links for people who want to read further about it generally. Mishumania (talk) 16:37, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

It's very clear that incentive-centered design will be a is notable topic on Wikipedia and therefore should not be venerable to deletion. Overall, the progress looks fantastic--the sections seem to be very flushed out and the references look appropriately diverse and comprehensive. However, due to the diversity of the topics covered in the article as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, I agree that it is important to properly categorize what exactly is incentive-centered design and differentiate it from something like human centered design. Also in terms of practical applications and future applications, I think that the content within the sections are valuable to the article but the titles may not be the best representations of the content--as they are now, they don't seem like they belong in an encyclopedia article. Practical applications should probably be named something closer to "uses of ICD" and future applications seems more like "implications of ICD". These could even be combined into one section to better fit the encyclopedic nature of the entry. Anyways, just some things to consider. Overall, looks great. Kl462 (talk) 17:48, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

The concept looks in many ways related to Gamification, and in fact they're both often discussed together. It would be interesting if you can find some source detailing how are they different; they have many similarities. Diego (talk) 14:33, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Reaching out to the Community
We've reached out to the following wikipedians. We made this list by looking at the most active contributors from the different Wiki pages that are similar to our topic. So far, none of them have responded to our communications. We're currently monitoring the user's talk pages for any contact.

User-Centered Design

 * Ronz
 * Boxplot
 * Diego Moya
 * Michael Hardy
 * Toeinriver

Social Computing

 * Sj
 * MaxVeers
 * Ascii27
 * Leedryburgh

Reputation System

 * Algomaster
 * Nabeth
 * Jsnow
 * Marcmaxson
 * Munkee madness

We've also reached out to the following people via email, and are waiting for a response:
 * Jeff Mackie-Mason (UMich)
 * Rick Wash (UMich)
 * Thomas E. Carroll (Wayne State) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmc242 (talk • contribs) 21:50, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

You have some reactions already at the Observer's Feedback section above, you should start by answering to that feedback. Diego (talk) 08:38, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Proposed Image Links
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmc242 (talk • contribs) 01:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)


 * http://www.greentechnolog.com/images/Fusion%20and%20its%20leaves.jpg
 * http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_yGCbwZ5Dd0/T-DbN0_CQlI/AAAAAAAAAqk/KNTgwu0CqG8/s1600/xbox+achievements.jpg


 * http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=9747795&searchId=7d5a8c3acdda7bfeb93e3a3a0a315c0c&npos=4
 * http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=10555370&searchId=3e4a8af99b6d95464b95b3e92fdec030&npos=14
 * http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=10023274&searchId=35522ba5e3b619eaaa33739ae8fdf176&npos=16

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmc242 (talk • contribs) 01:46, 4 October 2012 (UTC)