How Universal is Behavior? A Four Country Comparison of Spite, Cooperation and Errors in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of subjects' behavior from two complementary points of view. If yields information about situations where, in purely pecuniary terms, it is a dominant strategy to contribute all the endowment and about situations where it is a dominant strategy to contribute nothing. Our results show, first, that differences in behavior across countries are minor. We find that when people play "the same game" they behave similarly. Second, for all four countries our data are inconsistent with the explanation that subjects contribute only out of confusion. A common cooperative motivation is needed to explain the date.experimental economics, cooperation, public goods games

A reliable past or a reliable pest? Testing canonical stimuli in speech perception research

A growing body of research is exploring second language (L2) learners’ listening perception of vowel contrasts. Conventionally, researchers have estimated how well listeners differentiate between L2 vowels with isolated words (or syllables) in a fixed consonantal frame, such as b-vowel-t (e.g., beat-bit). However, there is a dearth of research that systematically examines how well results generalise beyond isolated frames or the suitability of employing more phonologically and sententially diverse listening prompt types for assessing L2 vowel perception. To address this gap, two studies investigated the effects of using b-vowel-t and more diverse prompt types for assessing intermediate-advanced adult L2 perception of English /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ vowel pairs. Prompt performance was measured for internal consistency, congruence with the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 speech learning (Best & Tyler, 2007), and listeners’ subjective experiences with each prompt type. Mixed effects modelling investigated the predictive power of b-vowel-t performance on more diverse prompt types. Study 1 explored prompt performance using closed-set, forced choice tasks with first language (L1) Mandarin and Korean listeners. Study 2 investigated the effect of Mandarin and Spanish L1 listeners’ target word familiarity and associations with sentence prompts using transcription-response tasks and self-report surveys. Both studies found that diverse prompts had adequate internal consistency and aligned with PAM-L2 predictions. B-vowel-t prompts poorly generalised to diverse prompts and accorded less with PAM-L2 predictions. Survey results showed increased demands from more diverse prompt types based on participants’ ratings; however, this did not always correspond to lower performance. Collectively, results indicate utility in employing prompts beyond isolated words in a fixed consonantal frame for laboratory and at-home administrations. These findings contribute to the vowel perception literature by evaluating and extending the scope of prompts which may be used

AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly smart and autonomous, targeting real-world pragmatic missions beyond traditional NLP tasks. As a result, there has been an urgent need to evaluate LLMs as agents on challenging tasks in interactive environments. We present AgentBench, a multi-dimensional evolving benchmark that currently consists of 8 distinct environments to assess LLM-as-Agent's reasoning and decision-making abilities in a multi-turn open-ended generation setting. Our extensive test over 27 API-based and open-sourced (OSS) LLMs shows that, while top commercial LLMs present a strong ability of acting as agents in complex environments, there is a significant disparity in performance between them and OSS competitors. We identify the typical reasons of failures in environments and LLMs, showing that poor long-term reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following abilities are the main obstacles for developing usable LLM agents. Training on code and high quality multi-turn alignment data could improve agent performance. Datasets, environments, and an integrated evaluation package for AgentBench are released at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/AgentBench}.Comment: 55 page

ABCDE -- Agile Block Chain Dapp Engineering

Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 8 table

Is it a norm to favour your own group?

This paper examines the relationship between norm enforcement and in-group favouritism behaviour. Using a new two-stage allocation experiment with punishments, we investigate whether in-group favouritism is considered as a social norm in itself or as a violation of a different norm, such as egalitarian norm. We find that which norm of behaviour is enforced depends on who the punisher is. If the punishers belong to the in-group, in-group favouritism is considered a norm and it does not get punished. If the punishers belong to the outgroup, in-group favouritism is frequently punished. If the punishers belong to no group and merely observe ingroup favouritism (the third-party), they do not seem to care sufficiently to be willing to punish this behaviour. Our results shed a new light on the effectiveness of altruistic norm enforcement when group identities are taken into account and help to explain why in-group favouritism is widespread across societies.This is the accepted manuscript. The final publication is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9417-9

Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti

We conducted an experimental study in Haiti testing for the relationship between religious belief and individual risk taking behavior. 774 subjects played lotteries in a standard neutral protocol and subsequently with reduced endowments but in the presence of religious images of Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo tradition. Subjects chose between paying to play a lottery with an image of their choice, and saving their money to play with no image. Those who chose the former are dened as image buyers and those who chose the latter as non-buyers. Image buyers, who tend to be less educated, more rural, and to exhibit greater religiosity, bet more than non-buyers in all games. In addition, in the presence of religious images all participants took more risk, and buyer took more risk when playing in the presence of their chosen images than when playing with other images. We develop a theoretical model calibrated with our experimental data to explore the channels through which religious images might aect risk-taking. Our results suggest that the presence of images tends to increase individuals' subjective probability of winning the lottery, and that subjects therefore believe in a god who intervenes actively in the world in response to their requests

Daily Eastern News: February 25, 1991

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_1991_feb/1015/thumbnail.jp