With the launch of a new journal, Professor Vincent Conitzer is going where no journal has gone before.

ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, which started accepting submissions last fall, will publish its first issue as well as a special issue later this year. Conitzer, who was named a Bass teaching fellow at Duke in May, serves as co-editor in chief of the journal with Google economist Preston McAfee, formerly the J. Stanley Johnson professor of business, economics and management at Caltech.

“There’s no other journal in this area at this point,” said Conitzer, an Artificial Intelligence faculty member in Computer Science with a secondary appointment in Economics. “It’s a new space to move into. Other journals have published papers in this area. But this is the first journal dedicated to this particular area, so we’re excited about that.”.

Research in the interdisciplinary area between computer science and economic theory has taken off since around 2000, originating in part from electronic commerce. People in the field today study topics such as game theory and its security applications as well as how to design expressive marketplaces. Such marketplaces — seen in combinatorial auctions and the procurement of services — allow preferences to be communicated more clearly. But with the allowance of richer preferences come larger computational components.

“It’s much more natural to say, ‘I want this collection of items and this is what I’m willing to pay for it; and if you can’t do that, then I don’t want any of the items,’ ” Conitzer said. “There are various scenarios where you want to be able to express something like that. The flip side of that is now things become computationally much more difficult because now if you imagine having received a bunch of these different bids, it’s not so clear who wins anymore.”

Computer scientists have been most active in the field, but the hope is that the new journal can attract submissions from economists as well as others for a truly interdisciplinary journal.

As a Bass teaching fellow, Conitzer is now the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Computer Science — a five-year endowed chair — and a lifetime member of the Bass Society of Fellows, which works to enhance the undergraduate experience. Duke has nine endowed chairs in the Bass Program for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. The program recognizes professors with outstanding records in research and undergraduate teaching.

“It’s a very well-established and engaged group of people,” Conitzer said. “They really have interesting ideas about education at Duke, so it’s an honor to be part of that group.”