Notes from the EC ’ 13 Program Chairs

Issue 12.1 of SIGecom Exchanges includes a letter from the program chairs of EC'13, a survey, and six research letters. The purpose of the first letter is to update the community about some of the decisions and discussions surrounding EC'13. The previous Exchanges issue—11.2—included a letter from the SIG chair David Parkes, and going forward the plan is to alternate between these two types of updates, publishing a letter from the SIG chair in each December issue and a letter from the EC chairs in each June issue. The survey continues a new tradition that started with Eric Budish's survey in issue 11.2. This tradition actually turned out to be very useful—when I want to catch up on a hot area all I need to do is invite a survey, wait a few months, and voiì a! This time I invited Mallesh Pai and Aaron Roth to contribute a survey on differential privacy and mechanism design. There has been a lot of action in this space lately, including very recent workshops at Caltech and in NYC, and an upcoming EC workshop organized by Mallesh and Aaron. Their survey is a 22-page masterpiece that is as readable and intuitive as it is comprehensive (the area is still young enough to be covered in full). Tip: don't miss footnote 11! Puzzle-loving readers may have noticed that issue 11.2 did not include a new puzzle, and indeed the puzzle section has been discontinued. If you sorely miss the puzzles, please drop me an email. I want to thank Daniel Reeves for his contributions as puzzle editor. As usual, Felix Fischer (the SIG's information director) played an important role in putting the issue together; thanks! This note describes our experience as 2013 ACM Electronic Commerce (EC) program chairs and summarizes a survey we ran after the program was complete. Track System EC is the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, systems, and applications at the interface of economics and computer science, including applications to electronic commerce. EC'13 continued the 2012 track process involving three non-exclusive focus areas or tracks. The three tracks are: —Theory and Foundations (TF) —Artificial Intelligence and Applied Game Theory (AI) —Experimental, Empirical, and Applications (EA) We expanded the AI track to include applied game theory, on the principle that applied game theory is usually more like AI than CS theory. The track system represents a compromise. The expansion of …