Seth Frey

headshot, Seth Frey

Associate Professor

376 Kerr Hall

Education

  • Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics at Indiana University, 2013
  • B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley, 2004

About

I am a computational social scientist who studies common-pool resource governance institutions, and other examples of complex human decision behavior, using computational methods, large datasets, and web-based experiments. I focus on online communities, treating them as models of governance. My expertise is in computational approaches to institutions and the cognitive science of strategic behavior.

I am a professor in Communication at UC Davis, in the Computational Communication lab, and an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Previously I was a behavioral economist at Disney Research Zurich, a part of Walt Disney Imagineering. I am a UC graduate, from Berkeley.

My work has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, Ford Foundation, and the Google Open Source Foundation.

Research Focus

I work on data from games, sports, online communities, and theme parks, using approaches of data science, lab experiments, and computational modeling to answer quantitative questions about human organizations, institutions, and communication. Some relevant research keywords include computational social science, strategic behavior, higher-level reasoning, science of cooperatives, Ostrom Workshop, quantitative models of institutional evolution, online games, online communities, self-governance, cooperatives.

Students or aspiring graduate students:

"Smartness" aside, if you like being busy and pushing yourself, having too much going on, if you can fake it till you make it, if you read a lot and enjoy thinking about humanity and going down personal research rabbit holes, if you can observe, analyze, and try to solve your own obstacles to being how you want to be, try imagining yourself with a PhD. A good story and solid evidence of resourceful pursuit of knowledge are a real substitute for awesome grades, great letters, and the best school.  If on top of all that you like ideas and intellectual freedom, even more than money, you might be a fit for academia! 

My topics are diverse, but they generally have to do with governance technology or the reasoning/cognitive mechanisms of social-scale outcomes. If you are interested in a data science training, particularly its applications at the intersection of communication, cognition, games, complex systems, or any combination of the other keywords, I'd be happy to talk.

 

Publications

Complete publications, via Google Scholar

Teaching

 

  • CMN 212 Web Science Research Methods
  • CMN 213 Simulation Methods in Communication Research
Documents