Now I know he didn't write that for my social class... half of those phrases set off my shotgun totin', flag lovin', blueneck 'til the day I die alarms. "Incentive mechanisms"? "Predictable, desirable behavior"? "Engineering socio-technical systems"?

Makes it sound like there's a rat chasing cheese in a maze... and I ain't the guy holding the clipboard and looking down on it all.

: Draw your own conclusions...
: From his website:

: In my research, I identify incentive mechanisms: technological
: design patterns that lead to predictable, desirable behavior.
: Having a toolbox of incentive mechanisms allows us to move from
: building technical systems to engineering socio-technical
: systems. Identifying these causal relationships also allows us
: to better understand the use of these systems, and the effects
: these systems have on their users.

: To identify and characterize incentive mechanisms, I draw on
: theories of motivation and incentives from human-computer
: interaction, economics, communications, and social psychology to
: understand, explain, and then predict behavior of users. I
: combine these theories with my computer science background to
: identify and design technical features that can reliably induce
: desired behaviors across a wide variety of computer systems. I
: use this interdisciplinary approach because these systems are
: inherently socio-technical; their effectiveness depends
: critically on both the social behavior and the technical design
: of the system. I use a variety of approaches to study incentive
: mechanisms in social media; my research includes economic
: modeling, quantitative server log analysis, both lab and field
: experiments, and qualitative inquiry.