Building Economic Models of Human Computer Interaction

Abstract

Economics provides an intuitive and natural way to formally represent the cost and benefits of interacting with applications, interfaces and devices. By using economics models it is possible to reason about interaction and make predictions about how changes to the system will affect performance and behavior. In this course, we provided an overview of relevant economic concepts and then showed how economics can be used to model human computer interaction to generated hypotheses about interaction which can be used to inform design and guide experimentation. As a case study, we demonstrate how various interactions with search and recommender applications can be modeled, before concluding the day with a hands-on modeling session using example and participant problems.