Magazine: Fall 2017 | Volume 24, No. 1
When hearing the terms “game theory” and “gamification” for the first time, they may sound almost synonymous. Interestingly, though, the word “game” has a very different meaning for each of these terms. The “game” in game theory is any interaction where one can “cleverly” choose their action (usually to optimize their outcome). The “game” in gamification is a fun pastime activity, from which one can borrow elements and themes that help engage users. Despite the separate evolution of each of these fields, and the different meaning of the term “game” in each of them, a central theme in both of these fields is incentivizing, or motivating, users to act in certain ways. The articles that comprise this issue of XRDS aim to introduce you, our reader, to a diverse but representative sample of scenarios from the worlds of algorithmic game theory and gamification, where a program or algorithm aims to incentivize or motivate some users to act in a certain manner. In a world where many computing systems interact with anonymous users from across the globe, such concerns have become more central than ever before.
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DEPARTMENT: Updates
MacACM: Encouraging competitive programming via mentorship and outreach
By Anshuman Majumdar
DEPARTMENT: Blogs
How 1 million app calls can tell you a bit about malware
The XRDS blog highlights a range of topics from conference coverage, to security and privacy, to CS theory. Selected blog posts, edited for print, are featured in every issue. Please visit xrds.acm.org/blog to read each post in its entirety. If you are interested in joining as a student blogger, please contact us.
By Dimitris Mitropoulos
SECTION: Features: Incentivizing Truthfulness
Algorithms versus mechanisms
Online markets and platforms rely on human user decisions as inputs. This generates the challenge of managing user incentives and misbehaviors as strategic entities. Surprisingly, one can show that designers do not require much additional computational power to overcome this challenge.
By Rad Niazadeh
Spliddit
Spliddit.org is a not-for-profit academic endeavor with the mission to provide free access to sophisticated and provably fair methods developed in the scientific community. Spliddit has been a major driving force for novel theoretical and empirical fair division research.
By Nisarg Shah
Do Humans Play Equilibrium? Modeling Human Behavior in Computational Strategic Systems
Online auctions and other computational strategic systems where human users interact are usually analyzed based on the assumptions that the users are rational and reach an equilibrium. This article shows that these modeling assumptions lead to significant errors, and that using behaviorally appropriate assumptions is important for achieving credible predictions in such systems.
By Gali Noti
Differential privacy as a tool for truthfulness in games
Differential privacy guarantees the input data from a single individual has a very small impact on the output of a computation. Tools from privacy can also be used in game theory and economics to incentivize people to truthfully reveal their data.
By Rachel Cummings
SECTION: Features: Incentivizing Actions and Effort
Incentivizing exploration via information asymmetry
As self-interested individuals make decisions over time, they utilize information revealed by others in the past and produce information that may help others in the future. So how can we incentivize exploration for the sake of the common good?
By Aleksandrs Slivkins
Incentives and the crowd
Crowdsourcing gives us a way to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and machines. But how do we solve the problem of low-quality crowdwork?
By Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
SECTION: Features: Motivating Participation
OPEN ACCESS
Games user research and gamification in human-computer interaction
Video games inspire new tools for creating engaging user experiences.
By Lennart E. Nacke
Gamified and persuasive systems as behavior change agents for health and wellness
Gameful elements and persuasive strategies can motivate and encourage people to take charge of their health and achieve their ultimate wellness goal.
By Dennis L. Kappen, Rita Orji
The ethics of gamification
Gamification is manipulation; at least that is what many people think. Because gamification is a powerful tool for modifying behaviors, how we should consider ethics specifically for gamification?
By Andrzej Marczewski
