When multiple clients are collaboratively learning and training a shared model, incentives problems can arise. The clients may have different learning objectives and application domains, or they may be competitors whose participation in the learning system could reduce their competitive advantage. While collaborative learning is a powerful…

This work is about analyzing games as models of systems. The goal is to understand the techniques that have been used by game designers in the past, and to compare them to the study of mathematical game theory. Through the study of a system or concept a model often emerges that can effectively educate students about making intelligent decisions…

In the first part of this dissertation, we study the competition among network service providers in a parallel-link network with the presence of elastic user demand that diminishes both with higher prices and congestion. First we analyze a game where providers strategically price their service for single class of traffic. Later we analyze a game…

Conversational grounding theory proposes that language use is a form of rational joint action, by which dialog participants systematically and collaboratively add to their common ground of shared knowledge and beliefs. Following recent work applying "game theory" to pragmatics, this thesis develops a game-theoretic model of grounding that…

My dissertation contains three studies centering on the question: how to motivate people to share high quality information on online information aggregation systems, also known as social computing systems? I take a social scientific approach to "identify" the strategic behavior of individuals in information systems, and "analyze" how non-monetary…