AI Seminar ------------------------------- Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm 175 ATL (Large Conference Room) "Information Asymmetry and Thwarting Spam" Thede Loder Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Michigan ---------------------------------- I will be presenting some cross-disciplinary collaborative work on the economics of email spam. I'll begin with a simple framework for email value that is general enough to accomodate the existing popular anti-spam systems. Then we'll move onto an economic mechanism (from Mechanism Design) designed to restore value and control to the mailbox owner which makes use of standard means for solving information-asymmetry problems. The presentation will be an extended version of what we recently gave at the MIT spam conference two weeks ago. Word phrases like 'expected utility' and 'maginal cost' will be used often, and since spam is something that annoys everyone, I'm hoping for some lively Q and A. Here's an abstract from our working paper posted on SSRN (here) We explore an alternative approach to spam based on economic rather than technological or regulatory screening mechanisms. We employ a model email value which supports two intuitive notions: 1) mechanisms designed to promote valuable communication can often outperform those designed merely to block wasteful communication, and 2) designers of such mechansisms should shift focus away from the information in the message to the information known to the sender. We then use principles of information asymmetry to cause people who knowingly misuse communication to incur higher costs than those who do not. In certain cases, though not all, we can show this approach leaves recipients better off than even an idealized or ``perfect'' filter that costs nothing and makes no mistakes. Our mechanism also accounts for individual differences in opportunity costs, and allows for bi-directional wealth transfers while facilitating both sender signaling and recipient screening. Authors: Thede Loder, Marshall Van Alstyne, Rick Wash