Guest Editorial: Special section on social and economic computing

Social computing can be broadly defined as the computational facilitation of social studies and human social dynamics as well as the design and use of computing technologies that consider social contexts. With the development and adoption of social computing technologies, social computing systems are increasingly involved with the economic contexts and applications. In addition, with the development of economic systems, researchers are employing computational technologies both for computational economic modeling and for the computational solution of analytically and statistically formulated economic problems. Similar to social computing, economic computing is an interdisciplinary area which explores the intersection of computational sciences and economics. It is the key to the development of computational theories, models, and tools that facilitate economic studies, and the design and construct of economic systems using computing technologies. Given the significant growth and maturing of the social and economic computing academic literature, there is a critical need to publish a collection of representative research pieces to provide an integrated and synthesized view of the current state-of-the-art, identify key challenges and opportunities for future studies, and promote community- building among social and economic computing researchers and practitioners. This special section will meet this need. In this special section, the chairs selected three top research papers after a rigorous and careful review process. The papers address different problems of great relevance and significance to services computing.