Event Details

Game-Theoretic and Behavioral Economic Insights on Social Media Conference will be held virtually on 25th and 26th February 2021.

During the past decade, social media has changed modern society, but the influence of academic research on social media’s practices and policies has been limited.

The purpose of the event is to bring together social media policy-makers and researchers who work in the field to foster collaboration between the two sectors.

Game theory and behavioural economics are the most relevant academic disciplines for studying social media’s policies. Game theory is the theory of interactive decision making. Through many decades of research, the field has produced plenty of analytical tools to understand better how different policies may affect behaviour.

In recent years the sub-fields of mechanism design and network theory flourished, and tools/results that are more specifically relevant for policymaking on social networks have been developed. Behavioural economics (that emerged from game theory) brings psychological and sociological aspects into the discussion and empirical tools such as lab and field experiments.

We hope that this collaboration will improve the quality of content that appears on social media, increase efficiency and fairness of social media practices, and find measures to address users’ concerns (such as privacy), to eventually, improve users’ benefits and experience from their interactions on social media.

Speakers include:

• Organisers: Luisa Affuso, Ofcom and Eyal Winter, Lancaster University

• Guy Ben-Ishai, Head of Economic Policy Research, Google

• Christopher Doyle, Principal, Ofcom

• Andrea Galeotti, Professor of Economics, LBS

• Eliana Garces, Director of Economic Policy, Facebook

• Arturo Gonzalez, Director and Global Head of Policy, Facebook

• Sanjeev Goyal, Professor of Economics, Cambridge

• Matthew Jackson, Professor of Economics, Stanford

• Julian Jamison, Former US Consumer Protection Bureau Economist and Professor of Economics, Exeter

• Martin Peitz, Former member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy (EAGCP), European Commission and Professor of Economics, Mannheim

• Jeff Prince Former Chief Economist, FCC, and Professor of Economics, Indiana

• Orly Sade, Professor of Finance, Hebrew University and NYU

• Fernando Vega, Professor of Economics, Bocconi

To view the full event schedule, please see the programme