Keynote Speakers

Kimberly Thompson
Kid Risk, Inc.
Using Models to Inform Policy: Insights from Modeling the Complexities of Global Polio Eradication
- March 29, 8:30-9:15am

Peter Cramton
University of Maryland
Medicare Auctions: A Case Study of Market Design in Washington, DC
- March 29, 1:00-1:45pm

Herbert Gintis
Central European University and the Santa Fe Institute
Agent-based Models of Complex Dynamical Systems of Market Exchange
- March 30, 8:15-9:00pm

Sarit Kraus
Bar-Ilan University and University of Maryland
Agents that Negotiate Proficiently with People
- March 31, 8:15-9:00am

Using Models to Inform Policy: Insights from Modeling the Complexities of Global Polio Eradication

Kimberly Thompson

Kid Risk, Inc.


Drawing on over 20 years of experience modeling risks in complex systems, this talk will challenge SBP participants to develop models that provide timely and useful answers to critical policy questions when decision makers need them. The talk will include reflections on the opportunities and challenges associated with developing integrated models for complex problems and communicating their results effectively. Dr. Thompson will focus the talk largely on collaborative modeling related to global polio eradication and the application of system dynamics tools. After successful global eradication of wild polioviruses, live polioviruses will still present risks that could potentially lead to paralytic polio cases. This talk will present the insights of efforts to use integrated dynamic, probabilistic risk, decision, and economic models to address critical policy questions related to managing global polio risks. Using a dynamic disease transmission model combined with probabilistic model inputs that characterize uncertainty for a stratified world to account for variability, we find that global health leaders will face some difficult choices, but that they can take actions that will manage the risks effectively. The talk will emphasize the need for true collaboration between modelers and subject matter experts, and the importance of working with decision makers as partners to ensure the development of useful models that actually get used.

About the speaker:

Dr. Thompson's research interests and teaching focus on the issues related to developing and applying quantitative methods for risk assessment and risk management, and consideration of the public policy implications associated with including uncertainty and variability in risk characterization. Drawing on a diverse background, she seeks to effectively integrate technological, social, political, legal, and economic issues into risk analyses that inform public policy and improve decision making in what she calls the "Age of Risk Management." She created and directed the Kids Risk Project at the Harvard School of Public Health between January 2000 and January 2009, at which point she created Kid Risk, Inc. as a self-standing, non-profit organization. Dr. Thompson maintains long-standing interests in the issues related to variability in risk for sensitive sub-populations, particularly children, and the potential risk trade-offs associated with policies designed to protect them. The Kids Risk Project pursued a wide range of research topics, including injury, environmental, medical, and product-related risks, as well as perception of children's risks and the portrayal of risky behaviors in popular entertainment media. In January 2003, Professor Thompson co-founded the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston with Dr. Michael Rich. Dr. Thompson's research currently focuses heavily on system dynamics and dynamic modeling, particularly focusing on policies for polio risk management after the success of global eradication of wild polioviruses. As the use of quantitative analysis continues to grow, Professor Thompson looks at how the type of analysis used (e.g., cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, decision analysis, value-of-information analysis, risk-only or health-only analysis, etc.) influences and determines policy outcomes. She developed and taught a course on Probabilistic Risk Analysis: Assessment, Management, and Communication. Building on her broad training, Professor Thompson focuses on the characterization of information and communication of risks. She developed a guide to help consumers take charge of health information that appeared in her 2004 book called Risk in Perspective: Insight and Humor in the Age of Risk Management (Newton, MA: AORM, available from Atlas Books). She received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from M.I.T. and her Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. Recognized as a Society for Risk Analysis/Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer and popular keynote speaker, she is a Past-President and Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), which honored her with its 2004 Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award. In 2008, she received the Jay Wright Forrester Award from the System Dynamics Society for some of the Kids Risk Project's research on polio.

Medicare Auctions: A Case Study of Market Design in Washington, DC

Peter Cramton

University of Maryland


One sensible way to reduce healthcare costs is to harness market forces, where practical, to nurture competition and innovation. Lower prices and improved services should follow. However, the switch to market pricing is not an easy one. s experience with medical supplies illustrates the challenges and offers some important lessons. The key lesson is that government programs can benefit from introducing market methods, but doing so requires good designMedicare marketsomething that may not come naturally to the implementing agency, especially in light of political forces and organizational inertia.

An auction design for Medicare Durable Medical Equipment is presented. The design addresses the flaws in the current program. Bids are binding commitments. Each bid binds the bidder to particular performance obligations depending on the auction outcome. The bids are made credible through a rigorous qualification one month before the auction. Each bidder provides a financial guarantee in the form of a bid bond or a deposit in proportion to the bidder's capacity. Capacity is objectively estimated based on the bidder's supply in recent years. Each winner provides a performance guarantee in proportion to the winner's estimated volume won. The auction establishes a market clearing price for each product in each service area. The price paid to all suppliers is the clearing price that balances supply and demand. These prices are found in a simultaneous descending clock auction, a simple price discovery process that allows both substitutions across items and complementarities. Competition in the auction comes from new entry or the expansion of existing suppliers into new product categories and service areas. After the auction, the winners compete for Medicare beneficiaries by offering quality products and services. Thus, beneficiary choice is used to further strengthen incentives to provide high quality products and services.

About the speaker:

Peter C30ramton is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. Since 1983, he has conducted research on auction theory and practice. This research appears in the leading economics journals. The main focus is the design of auctions for many related items. Applications include spectrum auctions, electricity auctions, and treasury auctions. On the practical side, he is Chairman of Market Design Inc., an economics consultancy founded in 1995, focusing on the design of auction markets. Since 2001, he has played a lead role in the design and implementation of electricity auctions in France and Belgium, gas auctions in Germany, and the world's first auction for greenhouse gas emissions held in the UK in 2002. He has advised numerous governments on market design and has advised dozens of bidders in high-stake auction markets. Since 1997, he has advised ISO New England on electricity market design and was a lead designer of New England's forward capacity auction. He led the design of electricity and gas markets in Colombia, including the Firm Energy Market, the Forward Energy Market, and the Long-term Gas Market. Since June 2006, he played a leading role in the design and development of Ofcom's spectrum auctions in the UK. He has advised the UK, the US, and Australia on greenhouse gas auction design. He led the development of the FAA's airport slot auctions for the New York City airports. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Business from Stanford University.

Agent-based Models of Complex Dynamical Systems of Market Exchange

Herbert Gintis

The Santa Fe Institute, and Central European University


The standard Walrasian general equilibrium model is a static description of market clearing equilibria. Attempts over more than a century to provide a decentralized market dynamic that implements market equilibrium have failed. The reason is that a system of decentralized markets is a complex dynamical system in which the major form of learning is through experience (adaptive expectations) and imitating successful others (replicator dynamics).

I will present a model of decentralized market exchange where each individual produces one good and consumes many. I will show that an agent-based model of this economy converges to market equilibrium and is highly impervious to shocks. I will also present a model in which agents are firms and households, as in the standard Walrasian model. I will show that an agent-based model in this case converges strongly to market equilibrium, but with considerable excess volatility and large excursions from equilibrium. This is characteristic of error terms with "fat tails" as characterized in the complexity literature, and is due to the tendency of agents to imitate the successful, which leads to strongly correlated error distributions.

About the speaker:

Herbert Gintis (Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University, 1969) is External Professor, Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics, Central European University. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) head a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. His web site, www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis, contains pertinent information. Professor Gintis published Game Theory Evolving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and is coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). He is currently completing a book with Professor Bowles entitled A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution.

Agents that negotiate proficiently with people

Sarit Kraus

Bar-Ilan University


Negotiation is a process by which interested parties confer with the aim of reaching agreements. The dissemination of technologies such as the Internet has created opportunities for computer agents to negotiate with people, despite being distributed geographically and in time. The inclusion of people presents novel problems for the design of autonomous agent negotiation strategies. People do not adhere to the optimal, monolithic strategies that can be derived analytically, as is the case in settings comprising computer agents alone. Their negotiation behavior is affected by a multitude of social and psychological factors, such as social attributes that influence negotiation deals (e.g., social welfare, inequity aversion) and traits of individual negotiators (e.g., altruism, trustworthiness, helpfulness). Furthermore, culture plays an important role in their decision making and people of varying cultures differ in the way they make offers and fulfill their commitments in negotiation.

In this talk I will present the following two agents that negotiate well with people by modeling several social factors: The PURB agent that can adapt successfully to people from different cultures in complete information settings, and the SIGAL agent that learns to negotiate successfully with people in games where people can choose to reveal private information. These agents were evaluated in extensive experiments including people from three countries. I will also demonstrate how agents' opponent modeling of people can be improved by using models from the social sciences.

About the speaker:

Sarit Kraus (Ph.D. Computer Science, Hebrew University, 1989) is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland. She worked extensively in the following areas: the development of intelligent systems, negotiation and cooperation in mixed open environments (including people), personalization, learning and clustering, optimization of complex systems and security of physical systems. In 1995 Kraus was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. In 2001 she was awarded the IBM Faculty Partnership Award and in 2002 she was elected as AAAI fellow. In 2007 she was awarded the ACM SIGART Agents Research award and her paper with Prof. Barbara Grosz was a winner of the IFAAMAS influential paper award (joint winner). In 2008 she was elected as ECCAI fellow and in 2010 she was awarded the EMET prize. She has published over 270 papers in leading journals and major conferences and is an author of the book Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments(2001) and a co-author of a book on Heterogeneous Active Agents (2000); both published in MIT Press.