Chris Dellarocas is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Director of the Center for Complexity in Business at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland. Before joining the Smith School, Prof. Dellarocas taught at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT.

His research examines the implications of consumer-generated and social media for trade, marketing, operations and corporate strategy using a combination of game theoretic, econometric and simulation methods. His work has been published in prestigious venues, such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, IEEE Transactions and several ACM conferences. His work on online reputation formation, in particular, is considered to have made seminal contributions and has been highly cited by both scholars and the media.

Dellarocas serves as Associate Editor of the journals Management Science and Information Systems Research. He is the recipient of several research grants, including the prestigious NSF CAREER award. He is an inventor with 3 patents, an Advisory Board member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and a board member of several Web 2.0 startups.

Rosaria Conte is head of the LABSS (Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation) at the ISTC (Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology), and teaches Social Psychology at the Univ. of Siena.

She is a cognitive and social scientist, with a special interest for the study of positive social action (altruism, cooperation and social norms), and reputation-based social regulation. Quite active in the MAS field, she contributed to launch the field of social simulation in Europe. She is coordinator of both European and Italian research projects. She is President of the European Society of Social Simulation (ESSA) and of the Italian Association of Cognitive Science.

She has published about 120 among scientific articles and books on cognitive social agents, norms representation and reasoning, and agent-based simulation. Her research interests range from Agent Theory to Multi Agent Systems, from Agent-Based Social Simulation and Cultural Evolution to Info-societies and Virtual Markets.