Modeling User Behavior with Incentives: A Survey

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Modeling User Behavior with Incentives: A Survey"

by

Mr. Reza HADI MOGAVI


Abstract:

The sustainability of many online businesses and social media platforms is 
heavily dependent on the continuous contribution of their users. Hence, 
many system planners (or the platform designers) use incentives, as a 
solution, to stimulate their community members (henceforth agents) to 
contribute more actively. Planners of different domains employ different 
kinds of incentives such as scores, badges, and the monetary rewards to 
reinforce the positive contributions of the agents and also to recruit new 
agents. For example, in the domain of crowdsourcing and social media, the 
Q&A platforms usually use a combination of badge and reputation rewards to 
incentivize their agents (users) to answer more questions with better 
qualities. While in the domain of blockchain systems, for instance, the 
cryptocoins are rewarded to the agents (miners) as an incentivization for 
contributing their computational resources to the security of the network. 
In the past few years, the advances of computational technologies and the 
proliferation of human-computer studies have triggered significant 
research efforts to understand how different incentives steer user 
behavior in the online platforms. This has led to the advent of numerous 
approaches for modeling the user behavior with incentives. In this survey, 
we study (1) the background concepts of the user psychology and 
incentivization, (2) the variety of modeling approaches which are typical 
for user behavior studies considering their cons and pros each, and (3) 
how different online platforms incentivize their users to participate 
more. To the end, we introduce some of the left challenges in the field 
for the future work.


Date:			Thursday, 27 September 2018

Time:                  	10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 2408
                         Lifts 17/18

Committee Members:	Dr. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Siu-Wing Cheng (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Brian Mak
 			Dr. Wilfred Ng


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