Robin D. Hanson

 
Assisant Professor of Economics, George Mason University, starting 8/99.
Now Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research
140 Warren Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360
510-643-1884 (H: 925-686-8357)   hanson@econ.berkeley.edu

Fields of Interest: Health Policy, Regulation, Formal Political Theory, Economics of Future Technology.

Education

Seminars on Social Science & Health, American Medical Care System, 1997, U.C. Berkeley.

PhD 1997, California Institute of Technology,
    Advisors: J. Ledyard, R. McKelvey, T. Palfrey, S. Wilkie.
    Dissertation: Four Puzzles in Information and Politics: Product Bans, Informed Voters, Social
             Insurance, & Persistent Disagreement.

MS, MA (physics, philosophy of science) 1984, University of Chicago.

BS (physics) 1981, University of California at Irvine.

Experience

California Institute of Technology,
    T.A. to C. Plott, I. Lee, economics principles, to R. Kiewiet, political science principles, 1995-1996.
    R.A. to J. Ledyard & D. Porter, institution design and experiments for FCC & NASA, 1993-1995.

NASA Ames Research Center, research in Bayesian statistics, 1989-1993.

Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center, research in machine learning, 1984-1989.

Honors

Alfred P. Sloan Dissertation Fellowship, 1996.

Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, WWW, 1995.

Institute for Humane Studies Fellowship, 1993.

NASA Space Act Award, 1992.

Peer Reviewed Publications

Social Science
Consensus By Identifying Extremists. Theory and Decision 44(3):293-301, 1998.

Correction to McKelvey and Page, "Public and Private Information: An Experimental Study of Information Pooling". Econometrica 64(5):1223-1224, 1996.

Could Gambling Save Science? Encouraging an Honest Consensus. with Reply to Comments. and Comparing Peer Review to Information Prizes - A Possible Economics Experiment. Social Epistemology 9(1):3-33,45-48,49-55, 1995. First appeared in Gambling and Commercial Gaming: Essays in Business, Economics, Philosophy, and Science, ed. W. Eadington & J. Cornelius, 399-440. 1992.

Buy Health, Not Health Care. CATO Journal 14(1):135-141, 1994.

Can Wiretaps Remain Cost-Effective? Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery 37(12):13-15 1994. Also in The Electronic Privacy Papers: Documents on the Battle for Privacy in the Age of Surveillance, ed. B. Schneier & D. Banisar. John Wiley and Sons, 19-25, 1997.

Comment on the scientific status of econometrics. Social Epistemology 7(3):255-256, 1993.

Engineering
Decision Markets. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 14(3):16-19, May/June, 1999.

Super-Resolved Surface Reconstruction From Multiple Images. With P. Cheeseman, B. Kanefsky, R. Kraft, J. Stutz, Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, ed. G.R. Heidbreder, 293-308. Kluwer, 1996.

Reversible Agents: Need Robots Waste Bits to See, Talk, and Achieve? Proceedings of Workshop on Physics and Computation: PhysComp '92, 284-288. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1992.

Bayesian Classification with Correlation and Inheritance. With J. Stutz, P. Cheeseman, in Proc. of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2:692-698. Morgan Kaufmann, 1991.

Toward Hypertext Publishing, Issues and Choices in Database Design. ACM SIGIR Forum 22(1), 1988.

Working Papers

Under Review
Warning Labels as Cheap Talk: Why Regulators Ban Products, sent to American Economic Review.

For Savvy Bayesian Wannabes, Disagreements Are Not About Information, sent to Games & Econ. Beh.

Patterns of Patronage -- Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science, sent to Economic Inquiry.

Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization, revising for Icarus.

Must Early Life Be Easy? The Rythm of Major Evolutionary Transitions, revising for Origins of Life.

Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence, revising for Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

In Preparation
Treatment Futures: the Future of Medical Information Aggregation?

Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism.

Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes.

Adverse Selection in Group Insurance.

On Voter Incentives To Become Informed.

Other Publications

Editor & Discussant, A Critical Discussion of Vinge's Singularity Concept, Extropy Online, Oct. 1998.

Is a singularity just around the corner? Journal of Transhumanism 2, June 1998.

24 essays in DIY Futures - People's Ideas & Projects for a Better World, 4 in Creative Speculations, ed. Nicholas Albery. The Institute for Social Inventions, London, 1996, 1997.

Idea Futures. Wired 3(9):125. Excerpt was Quotable Quote, Wall Street Journal A14, 30 August, 1995.

The Story of Idea Futures. With Mark James, Sean Morgan, in Prix Ars Electronica 95, International Compendium of the Computer Arts, ed. H. Leopoldseder, C. Schopf, 54-59, 1995.

If Uploads Come First: The Crack of a Future Dawn. Extropy 6(2):10-15 1994. See also Lilliputian Uploads. 7(1):30-31, 1995, Nanarchy. 6(1):32-36, 1994, Wormhole Warfare. 6(1):38-39, 1994.

Has Penrose Disproved A.I.? Foresight Update 12:4-5, 1991. See also Market-Based Foresight 10:1,3-4 & 11:11, 1990.

References

Professor Robert Anderson 
Department of Economics   
549 Evans Hall #3880   
University of California   
Berkeley, California 94720-3880  
510-642-5248  

Professor Theodore Keeler 
Department of Economics   
549 Evans Hall #3880   
University of California   
Berkeley, California 94720-3880  
510-642-4411  

Professor John Ledyard 
Division of Humanities & Social Sciences MC 228-77   
California Inst. of Technology  
Pasadena, California 91125  
626-395-4037  

Links at http://hanson.berkeley.edu/vita.html