Colloquium Series: Michael Jordan

Our upcoming event for the Statistics Department Colloquium Series is scheduled for Monday, November 4 from 12:00 – 1:00pm (ET) and will be an in-person presentation Science Center Rm. 300H. Lunch will be provided to guests following the talk in SC 316. This week's speaker is Michael Jordan from UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Contracts, Uncertainty, and Incentives in Statistical Decision-Making

Contract theory is the study of economic incentives when parties transact in the presence of private information, and where prior distributions may not be common knowledge. We augment classical contract theory to incorporate a role for learning from data, where the overall goal of the adaptive mechanism is to obtain desired statistical behavior. We consider applications of this framework to problems in principal-agent regulatory mechanisms. We also consider systems in which data is a valued good, and principals and agents are arranged in markets consisting of multiple layers.