Computational challenges in e-commerce

Joan Feigenbaum, David C. Parkes, David M. Pennock have an article in the latest CACM on the above topic. They cover various aspect such as resource alloation, knowledge integration, interaction and privacy. They conclude by saying:

Understanding how to align the incentives of participants with systemwide objectives is fundamental to the design of the next generation of Web-scale services. Increasingly, design teams will require dual expertise in social science and computer science, adding competence in economics, sociology, and psychology to more traditionally recognized requirements such as algorithms, interfaces, systems, machine learning, and optimization.

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