Brownie: A Platform for Conducting NeuroIS Experiments

In the NeuroIS field, experimental software needs to simultaneously present experimental stimuli to participants while recording, analyzing, or displaying neurophysiological measures. For example, a researcher might record a user’s heart beat (neurophysiological measure) as the user interacts with an e-commerce website (stimulus) to track changes in user arousal or show a user’s changing arousal levels during an exciting game. In this paper, we identify requirements for a NeuroIS experimental platform that we call Brownie and present its architecture and functionality. We then evaluate Brownie via a literature review and a case study that demonstrates Brownie’s capability to meet the requirements in a complex research context. We also verify Brownie’s usability via a quantitative study with prospective experimenters who implemented a test experiment in Brownie and an alternative software. We summarize the salient features of Brownie as follows: 1) it integrates neurophysiological measurements, 2) it incorporates real-time processing of neurophysiological data, 3) it facilitates research on individual and group behavior in the lab, 4) it offers a large variety of options for presenting experimental stimuli, and 5) it is open source and easily extensible with open source libraries. In summary, we conclude that Brownie is innovative in its potential to reduce barriers for IS researchers by fostering replicability and research collaboration and to support NeuroIS and interdisciplinary research in cognate areas, such as management, economics, or human-computer interaction

meet2trade: An Electronic Market Platform and Experiment System

The development of new electronic markets is challenging, since many factors influence the market outcomes and hence the markets’ success. Even worse, a fundamental lesson learned from economics is that details matter: small changes in market design can have a significant impact on the market participant’s behaviors and thus on the achieved outcomes. Consequently a well structured process for design, implementation, testing and maintenance of markets is required. meet2trade is a software tool suite designed to systematically support each step of such a Market Engineering (ME) process. This paper presents the generic trading platform meet2trade that enables users to individually configure their own electronic markets, to run them on the integrated auction server, and to evaluate them using the built-in full-featured lab experiment system

Experimental platforms for behavioral experiments on social-ecological systems

Recently, there has been an increased interest in using behavioral experiments to study hypotheses on the governance of social-ecological systems. A diversity of software tools are used to implement such experiments. We evaluated various publicly available platforms that could be used in research and education on the governance of social-ecological systems. The aims of the various platforms are distinct, and this is noticeable in the differences in their user-friendliness and their adaptability to novel research questions. The more easily accessible platforms are useful for prototyping experiments and for educational purposes to illustrate theoretical concepts. To advance novel research aims, more elaborate programming experience is required to either implement an experiment from scratch or adjust existing experimental software. There is no ideal platform best suited for all possible use cases, but we have provided a menu of options and their associated trade-offs

TOWARDS A MULTI-PURPOSE FRAMEWORK FOR TAX-BENEFIT MICROSIMULATION.

This paper introduces a generalised model building platform (MMEANS) for implementing and using tax-benefit microsimulation models. It is designed to aid in the construction of single- and multi-country tax- benefit models by providing all essential components and a system by which these can be parameterised and combined into a full model. We explain the conceptual and computational issues arising in the design and development of MMEANS. One application of the software has been to construct EUROMOD, a 15 country European tax-benefit model (Immervoll et al., 1999; Sutherland, 2001). However, we argue that, apart from its direct usefulness for this model, MMEANS can be used as a general software tool for microsimulation model building.Microsimulation; Tax-Benefit Model; European Union

Essays in Behavioural Economics

The goal of behavioural economics is to improve classic microeconomic theory by introducing motives and concepts from related fields like psychology and sociology. The driving paradigm of most neo-classical economic research is the concept of the Homo Oeconomicus, a human who approaches all problems in a rational and typically selfish way and who possesses boundless computational power and flawless reasoning. Despite the obvious oversimplification, the given assumptions allow the precise analysis of a large number of complex problems and have led to many interesting and often surprising findings and theories. While the value of constructing theoretical economic models is beyond doubt, it is important to be aware that the simplifying assumptions made within limit the scope of the predictions made. The assumption that perfectly reasonable people interact in a strictly logical way often leads to conclusions which bear no resemblance to real-world observations. The role of behavioural economic research is not to abandon theoretical research but to question and test the assumptions made by economic models, to identify contradictions to actual observations when they occur and to develop alternative models to capture apparent flaws in the models, or, as one might argue, flaws in human behaviour. Examples for such flaws include loss aversion1 and non-exponential discounting which, despite being irrational from a theoretical perspective, seem to be prevalent themes in human behaviour. Social preferences play a role when people interact and social norms cause them to behave in a nice way when treated well or to reciprocate and punish their counterpart even at their own expense. Furthermore humans have difficulties when dealing with complex problems, which is referred to as bounded rationality. People tend to make calculation mistakes, use rough approximations and imprecise simplifications when facing difficult problems. The first three chapters of this dissertation cover three different topics tied to behavioural economics. They connect concepts originating from psychology and sociology like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the so-called locus of control and apply them to microeconomic problems like the optimal effort provision in a principal-agent setting. The fourth chapter is strongly related to computer science as it describes the development of a computer system intended to simplify the design and conduction of economic experiments. While it is the project most distant to economics, it is arguably also the most ambitious of the four projects

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Emotions and cognitive workload in economic decision processes - A NeuroIS Approach

The influence of cognitive and emotions on decision processes have been recently highlighted. Emotions interplay with the process of cognition, and determine decision processes. In this work, the role of external and internal influences on economic decision processes are studied. A NeuroIS method is applied for measuring emotions and cognitive workload. The lack of a suitable experimental platform for performing NeuroIS studies was recognized and the platform Brownie was developed and evaluated

A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems

Engineering Adaptive Interfaces – Enhancement of Comprehension and Decision-Making

The role of information systems is growing steadily and permeating more and more all levels of our society. Meanwhile, information systems have to support different user groups in various decision situations simultaneously. Hence, the existing design approach to creat- ing a unified user interface is reaching its limits. This work examines adaptive information system design by investigating user-adaptive information visualization and situation-aware nudging. An exploratory eye-tracking study investigates participants’ perception and comprehension of different financial visualizations and shows that none of them can be preferred across the board. Moreover, it reveals expertise knowledge as the research direction for visualization recommendations. Afterward, two empirical studies are conducted to relate different visualizations to participants’ domain-specific knowledge. The first study, conducted with a broad sample of the population, shows that financial and graphical literacy increases participants’ financial decision-making competency with certain visualizations. The second study, conducted with a more specific sample and an additional visualization, underlines a large part of the first study’s results. Additionally, it identifies statistical literacy as an increasing factor in financial decision-making. Both studies are demonstrating that different visualizations cause different cognitive loads despite the same amount of information. After all, the results are used to derive visualization recommendations based on domain-specific knowledge and cognitive load. This work also investigates the situation-aware effectiveness of nudging with the example of decision inertia. In a preliminary study, an experimental task is systematically transferred to different situational contexts by observing situational user characteristics. The identified contexts are examined in a subsequent large-scale empirical study with different nudges to reduce decision inertia. The results show gender-specific differences in decision inertia across the context. Hence, information system design has to adapt to gender and situational user characteristics to support users in their decision-making. Moreover, the study delivers empirical evidence for the contextual effectiveness of nudg- ing. Future nudging research has to incorporate situational user characteristics to provide effective nudges in different situational contexts. Especially, further fundamental research is needed to understand the situational effectiveness of nudging. The study identifies in- dividual situational preferences as one promising research stream