TL;DR for Seasoned Authors
- Papers submitted to EC’20 must be submitted to one of four tracks. However, in contrast to EC’19, the tracks emphasize different types of contributions, and are orthogonal to content areas.
- EC’20 is continuing and expanding the forward-to-journal option that was piloted by EC’19; new partner journals include Artificial Intelligence, Marketing Science, Naval Research Logistics, RAND Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.
- The new feature-at-INFORMS option allows authors to have their accepted EC submissions automatically considered for presentation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.
- Authors of papers that contain empirical results are strongly encouraged to submit their code and data as supplementary material.
Background
Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom) has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, empirics, and applications at the interface of economics and computation. The 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’20) will feature invited speakers, a highlight of papers from other conferences and journals, a technical program of submitted paper presentations and posters, workshops, and tutorials. EC’20 will be held from July 13 through July 17, 2020.
We solicit paper submissions for presentation in the technical program. The deadline for submissions is February 12, 2020 at 3pm EST.
Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Design of economic mechanisms: algorithmic mechanism design; market design; matching; auctions; revenue maximization; pricing; fair division; computational social choice; privacy and ethics.
- Game theory: equilibrium computation; price of anarchy; learning in games.
- Information elicitation and generation: prediction markets; recommender, reputation and trust systems; social learning; data markets.
- Behavioral models: behavioral game theory and bounded rationality; decision theory; computational social science; agent-based modeling.
- Online systems: online advertising; electronic commerce; economics of cloud computing; social networks; crowdsourcing; ridesharing and transportation; labor markets; cryptocurrencies; industrial organization.
- Methodological developments: machine learning; econometrics; data mining.
Timetable for Authors
- February 12, 2020 (3pm EST): Paper submission deadline
April 9, 2020: Reviews sent to authors for feedback(canceled due to COVID-19)April 14, 2020: Author responses due(canceled due to COVID-19)- May 6, 2020: Paper accept/reject notifications
- July 14-16, 2020: Conference technical program
Submission Instructions
Format. The body of the submission may be up to 18 pages, including bibliography. In addition, an appendix of arbitrary length may be included only for the review process (i.e., an appendix will not appear if the paper is published). This appendix will only be read at the discretion of the reviewers. The body of the submission should contain a clear presentation of the contributions of the paper, including a discussion of prior work and an outline of the key technical ideas and methods used to achieve the main claims. The submission as a whole should include all of the ideas necessary for an expert to verify fully the central claims in the paper. Submitted papers will be evaluated on significance of the contribution, originality, relation to prior research, technical quality, and exposition.
The submission should be typeset using 11-point or larger fonts, in a single-column, single-space (between lines) format with ample spacing throughout and 1-inch margins all around. Submissions deviating from these guidelines will be rejected without consideration of their merits.
Style files. Authors are encouraged to use the EC’20 LaTex style files to format submissions.
Tracks. EC’20 has four technical tracks. In contrast to previous editions of EC, the tracks differ by the types of contributions they emphasize; they are orthogonal to content areas. Papers submitted to each track will be evaluated primarily according to the criteria described below.
- Theory: Typical papers in this track make progress on existing theoretical problems, propose new ones, or introduce significant new techniques that could be applied more broadly.
- Applied Modeling: Typical papers in this track propose and analyze novel models that capture real-world phenomena or provide fresh perspectives on previously studied applied problems.
- AI and Computation: Typical papers in this track rely on computer-aided techniques to tackle complex problems that were previously beyond reach, or develop new such techniques.
- Empirics: Typical papers in this track draw significant insights from real or synthetic data, through access to new data sources or experiments, or through novel analysis of existing data sources.
Submission of code and data. In the interest of reproducibility, authors of papers that include empirical results are strongly encouraged to submit their code and data. Such material should be archived as a single zip file and submitted through Easychair as supplementary material.
Double-blind review process. Author identity is anonymized for SPC and PC members throughout the review process. As usual, SPC and PC member identity is also anonymized before reviews are disseminated to authors. Because the review process is double blind, authors must take measures to ensure that their identity is not easily revealed from the submission itself. Authors should include the submission number (as assigned by Easychair) in the author field of the submission, and refer to their prior work in a neutral manner (i.e., instead of saying “We showed” say “XYZ et al. showed”). To add the submission number, one must first submit a paper without a number, see what number was assigned, and then revise the submission to include this number. It is acceptable to submit work that has been presented in public or has appeared on arXiv, provided the submission itself is anonymized. PC members will be allowed to declare a conflict of interest with authors as well as with specific papers. Author information is accessible to the conference chairs, but not to the program committee members.
One page extended abstract option. To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can ask that only a one-page abstract of the paper appear in the proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper. Authors should guarantee the link to be reliable for at least two years. This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in a conference proceedings. Such papers must be submitted electronically and formatted just like papers submitted for full-text publication.
Simultaneous submission not allowed. Simultaneous submission of results to another conference with published proceedings is not allowed. Results previously published or presented at another archival conference prior to EC, or published at a journal prior to the submission deadline to EC, will not be considered. Simultaneous submission of results to a journal is allowed only if the author intends to publish the paper as a one-page abstract in EC. Papers that are accepted and appear as a one-page abstract can be subsequently submitted for publication in a journal but may not be submitted to any other conference that has a published proceedings. See below for a special note regarding GAMES.
Forward to journal. Authors of accepted papers will have the option to have reviews forwarded to a journal of their choice. Our partner journals are:
- ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
- Artificial Intelligence
- Games and Economic Behavior
- Journal of Economic Theory
- Management Science
- Marketing Science
- Mathematics of Operations Research
- Naval Research Logistics
- Operations Research
- Quantitative Marketing and Economics
- RAND Journal of Economics
- The Review of Economic Studies
Upon initial paper submission to EC’20, authors can choose at most one journal. Conditional upon acceptance, the authors may submit a journal version of their paper to the chosen journal, with a deadline of August 15, 2020. The cover letter should specify that the submission is part of the EC forward-to-journal process. Upon submission to the journal, the EC reviews will be forwarded, along with reviewer identities, to the contact editor at that journal.
For consideration in Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, Management Science, Marketing Science, Naval Research Logistics, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, RAND Journal of Economics, or the Review of Economic Studies, authors of accepted papers must also select the one-page extended abstract option for the proceedings version, explained above. Other journals may require additional content beyond the EC proceedings version; it is the responsibility of authors to ensure that the version submitted to a journal conforms with any journal-specific expectations regarding the prior proceedings version.
We emphasize that the ultimate disposition of the paper is within the editorial discretion of each journal, and in particular there is no guarantee of acceptance if the forward-to-journal option is elected. However, we do anticipate this process should result in a faster decision from the journal.
Note that submissions forwarded to journals in this manner can instead opt for the ACM TEAC special issue dedicated to EC’20. Any such an invitation will be made prior to the August 15, 2020, deadline for forwarding to a journal.
Feature at INFORMS. Authors can indicate if they wish to be considered for presenting their accepted EC’20 submissions in the special sessions at the 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, organized and sponsored by the INFORMS Auctions and Market Design (AMD) Section. To be considered for this fast-track selection process conducted by the AMD cluster chairs, the authors will need to provide a short non-technical abstract (at most 500 characters) by May 10, 2020, and indicate whether an intended presenter is an INFORMS job market candidate.
Resubmission to GAMES. Authors can also indicate if they wish to have their rejected EC’20 submissions evaluated for presentation at the 6th World Congress of the Game Theory Society (GAMES), which is co-located with EC’20. This option is made possible through a special arrangement with the GAMES organizers, and is meant to accommodate authors who are interested in both EC’20 and GAMES but are worried about the possibility of being rejected from EC’20 and missing out on both events.
Conflict of interest. Authors will have the opportunity to declare conflicts of interest (COIs) with SPC and PC members. This must be done separately for each submission. Declaring COIs prevents the specified SPC/PC member(s) from reviewing a paper, thereby constraining the matching process and so potentially negatively impacting review quality. For this reason, COIs should not be declared automatically based on a prior relationship (e.g., coauthor, friend, colleague in a different department at at the same institution, etc.). Instead, authors should declare CoIs only with respect to those SPC/PC members who may have difficulty being impartial in reviewing the submitted paper.
Questions?
Contact the PC chairs, Michael Ostrovsky and Ariel Procaccia.