David Pennock

Research Area: Econ and Social Sys
Location: Yahoo! Research New York

Profile

David Pennock is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in New York City, where he leads a group focused on microeconomics and electronic commerce research.

He has over fifty academic publications relating to computational issues in electronic commerce and the web, including papers in PNAS, Science, IEEE Computer, Theoretical Computer Science, AAAI, EC, and WWW.

He has given over twenty-five talks and authored one patent and four patent applications. In 2005, he was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 "top technology innovators under age 35" having the potential to profoundly impact the world.

Pennock is at the forefront of a growing vanguard of computer scientists and economists who are working together to investigate the role of computation in economic theory and to design and build the marketplaces of the digital age.

One of his primary areas of expertise is the design and analysis of prediction markets.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Pennock worked at NEC Research and Microsoft Research, and served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Reports on his research have appeared in Time, Discover, New Scientist, CNN, the Economist, and the New York Times.

Recent Publications, Projects and News

  • Predicting the Future with Basketball Bets - Fantasy stock market games are all the rage with Internet users. Even Yahoo! has its Tech Buzz Game, a fantasy prediction market where players bet on the technologies they think people will search for in the future.
  • A New Serving of Sponsored Search - Is there a better way to sell search ads? David Pennock, a Yahoo! Research scientist in the microeconomics group, believes there is always room for improvement.
  • Tech Buzz Game - The Tech Buzz Game -- a collaboration between Yahoo! Research and O'Reilly Media -- is a fantasy prediction market launched in March 2005 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California.
  • Yahoo! Research Earns Highest Number of Accepted Papers at the Eighth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '07) - Yahoo! Research Earns Highest Number of Accepted Papers at the Eighth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '07).
  • Yahoo!'s Nobel pursuit - Over at Yahoo, the approach to attracting the best and brightest engineers is to dangle before them potential stock-market wealth, along with freedom to analyze terabytes of data in pursuit of discoveries that may one day lead to a Nobel Prize, in economics.
  • David Pennock Appointed ACM SIGecom Chair - Congratulations to Scientist David Pennock for his recent appointment as ACM SIGecom Chair.