Hi, I’m Chen Hajaj
a postdoctoral researcher and data science fellow at Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering, working with Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.
Before joining Vanderbilt, I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at Bar-Ilan University, where I was lucky to have David Sarne and Avinatan Hassidim as my advisors.
I’m also part of the Data Science Visions TIP @ Vanderbilt University as a data science center.
My research activities are in the areas of Mechanism design, game theory, and crowdsourcing. The focus of my work is in investigating the problem of incentive design in complex interdependent systems. I study incentives in crowdsourcing, considering the general question of how to design payments and bonuses, as well as split up tasks, to elicit the most effort. Also, I consider fundamental problems in the economics of decision-making on networks, particularly about coordination and cooperation problems. One such problem is that of team formation: designing incentives for players to report their preferences over their prospective teammates honestly, while at the same time achieving higher-level social goals, such as maximizing overall welfare and fairness. The methods I develop include theoretical economic and computational analysis, algorithm development for implementing such mechanisms in practice, and experimental evaluation with actual human subjects.
For more information, please see my CV and Google Scholar page.
You can also reach me via [chen.hajaj at vanderbilt dot edu]