Project Grant 2542666

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $432,921 to the University of Colorado under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) through a CAREER Project Grant effective October 1, 2026, through September 30, 2031. This award supports theoretical research on the structure and economic incentives for eliciting and aggregating information across people, organizations, and automated systems. The project delivers three primary research components: (1) development of proper scoring rules and loss functions for evaluating information quality, correctness, and economic value in decision-making contexts, including publication of an educational monograph on information elicitation; (2) investigation of the complexity and interaction of multiple pieces of information across economic and algorithmic dimensions; and (3) design of incentive-based systems that encourage information provision and aggregation into useful outputs for both private and public sector applications.

The grant's outputs are intended to provide theoretical foundations and practical system designs applicable to data marketplaces, public health information gathering, and forecasting activities. Research activities address the relationship between value of information, decision-making accuracy, and prediction performance, with particular focus on properties such as utility and loss convexity. The research conducted at the Boulder, Colorado location is expected to advance foundational knowledge in information economics and machine learning loss function design while producing tools and methodologies with direct applicability to organizational and governmental information management challenges.