Trust is crucial not only for day to day interactions but also for sustaining memberships, bonds, ties and so on. In multi-agent systems(MAS), trust plays an important role in ensuring good interactions among agents. An agent may build ties with another agent influenced by degrees of competence and self-interest from past experiences. We have evaluated trust assessment mechanisms in MAS by focu...

Social choice theory concerns itself with the proper choice of a social state from a given feasible set of social states. The main question the theory addresses is how that social choice should depend on the profile of individual preferences. Early work by Arrow and various predecessors, including Condorcet, Borda, Dodgson and Black, was about the construction of a social preference ordering — ...

In my 1992 paper in Economic Notes, I argued that the traditional heuristic interpretation of taxes in the pivotal mechanism (in terms of the utility loss imposed by the taxed individual on the rest of society) is not correct, since it takes into account only the effect that the individual has on the decision concerning the project and disregards the effect that the same individual has on the t...

During the transformative period of adolescence, social influence plays a prominent role in shaping young people's emerging social identities, and can impact their propensity to engage in prosocial or risky behaviors. In this study, we examine the neural correlates of social influence from both parents and peers, two important sources of influence. Nineteen adolescents (age 16-18 years) complet...

We study the Price of Anarchy of mechanisms for the well-known problem of one-sided matching, or house allocation, with respect to the social welfare objective. We consider both ordinal mechanisms, where agents submit preference lists over the items, and cardinal mechanisms, where agents may submit numerical values for the items being allocated. We present a general lower bound of Ω( √ n) on th...

The goal of my research is to design mechanisms which combine computer power and human effort together to solve problems which cannot be solved by computers or humans alone. My research broadly spans and draws from the fields of machine learning, game theory, online optimization, and human-computer interaction. I am particularly interested in the design and analysis of social computation mechan...

The special issue collects a subset of the best papers presented at the ICRA’05 workshop on the Social Mechanisms of Robot Programming by Demonstration. The workshop took place on April 21st 2005 in Barcelona, Spain, at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’05). Eleven of the best papers presented at the workshop were subsequently submitted for peer review before publication in t...

Critics of functional explanations in social science maintain that such explanations are illegitimate unless a mechanism is specified. Others argue that mechanisms are not necessary for causal inference and that functional explanations are a type of causal claim that raise no special difficulties for testing. I show that there is indeed a special problem that confronts testing functional explan...

Most human cognition occurs outside conscious awareness or conscious control. Some of these implicit processes influence social perception, judgment and action. The past 15 years of research in implicit social cognition can be characterized as the Age of Measurement because of a proliferation of measurement methods and research evidence demonstrating their practical value for predicting human b...