Mr. Hahn and Mr. Litan are the Directors of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. The authors would like to thank Laura Goodman and Molly Wells for research assistance. This paper represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the institutions with which they are affiliated. It was prepared at the request of OMB to provide a peer review. J O I N T

Summary I am interested in (1) the design of intelligent agents and systems, primarily guided by machine learning; (2) modeling and understanding collective dynamics that result from intelligent individual behavior; and (3) using this understanding to inform the design of venues where people and automated agents come together to interact. A central focus of my research is on understanding how information flows through systems, how it can be best used by intelligent agents, and how its presence, absence, or the form in which it is available impacts decisions at the individual and systemic levels. My work can be categorized into four broad themes. 1: Collective intelligence I am interested in both modeling and understanding the dynamics of collective intelligence, and in designing algorithms that allow us to use the power of collective wisdom to make better decisions. I have been working on the foundations of a rigorous theory of how information grows in novel social media like Wikipedia and the blogosphere, and on information aggregation and dissemination in prediction markets. In recent work, we have documented some remarkable regularities in the life cycles of average Wikipedia pages and blog posts [26, 27]. They exhibit a concave rise to an editing / commenting peak, followed by decay at a 1/t rate over time. We have proposed a simple model of information creation that matches the data