Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase, and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm

Research on the Evolution and Dynamics of Issue Attention on China\u27s Climate Change

Tohoku University横田正顕課

Links between sustainability-related innovation and sustainability management

This paper analyses the link between sustainability-related innovation and sustainability performance and the role that family firms play in this. This theme is particular relevant from a European point of view given the large number of firms that are family-owned. Governments often support environmentally and socially beneficial innovation with various policy instruments with the intention is to increase international competitiveness and simultaneously support sustainable development. In parallel, firms use corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental management systems partly in the hope that this will foster such innovation in their organisation. Hence the main research question of this paper is about the association of CSR and environmental management with environmentally and socially beneficial innovation and its determinants. Based on panel data, the paper analyses the link of corporate sustainability performance with sustainability innovation and the effect of being a family firm using panel estimation techniques. The paper discusses the results of the analysis, which point to a moderating role of family firms on the link of sustainability innovation and performance and assesses the policy implications of this insight.sustainability, innovation, management, quantitative methods, family firms

National Aggregates and Individual Disaffiliation: An International Study

Using a data set of 15,000 subjects from 32 western countries, the current study examines individuals who were raised in a certain religion and at some stage of their lives left it. Currently, they define their religious affiliation as ‘no religion’. A battery of explanatory variables (country-specific, personal attributes and marriage variables) was employed to test for determinants of this decision. It was found that the tendency of individuals to leave their religion is strongly correlated with the degree of religious diversity of their country and with their spouse's religious characteristics. Moreover, personal socio-demographic features seem to be less relevant.religion, national aggregates, disaffiliation

Retaining the Thin Blue Line: What shapes workers' willingness not to quit the current work environment?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of police officers' willingness to quit their current department. For this purpose, we work with US survey data that covers a large set of police officers for the Baltimore Police Department in Maryland. Our results indicate that more effective cooperation between units, a higher trust in the work partner, a higher level of interactional justice and a higher level of work-life-balance reduces police officers' willingness to quit the department substantially. On the other hand, higher physical and psychological stress and the expereicene of traumatic events are not, ceteris paribus, correlated with the willingness to leave the department. It might be that police officers accept stress as an acceptable factor in their job description.Willingness to Quit the Job; Turnover Rates: Job Satisfaction; Stress; Police Officers; Work-Life Balance; Fairness; Acceptance.

Increasing returns and network structure in the evolutionary dynamics of industries

The paper explores the idea that properties at the level of firms coevolve with more aggregate properties at the level of market institutions in the dynamics of industries. We propose that the structure of network of vertical relations limits the effect of increasing returns at the firm level. The paper develops a set of empirical measures and discusses a detailed case study of the commercial jet engine industry. The analysis of the structural dynamics of the network of vertical relations between engine suppliers and airframe manufacturers during the history of the industry (1958-1997) explains a final configuration of the industry marked by the coexistence of increasing returns to investments in R&D and marketing activities, with an intense competition among a few large incumbents, a low level of concentration and a strong instability of market shares. The emergence of a hierarchical network with a core and a periphery leads to equalisation of technical and market opportunities within the core and prevents incumbents to exit the industry.increasing returns; concentration; market shares; aircraft-engine industry; vertical relations; network.

The Self-Organisation of Strategic Alliances

Strategic alliances form a vital part of today's business environment. The sheer variety of collaborative forms is notable - which include R&D coalitions, marketing and distribution agreements, franchising, co-production agreements, licensing, consortiums and joint ventures. Here we define a strategic alliance as a cooperative agreement between two or more autonomous firms pursuing common objectives or working towards solving common problems through a period of sustained interaction. A distinction is commonly made between 'formal' and 'informal' inter-firm alliances. Informal alliances involve voluntary contact and interaction while in formal alliances cooperation is governed by a contractual agreement. The advantage of formal alliances is the ability to put in place IPR clauses, confidentially agreements and other contractual measures designed to safeguard the firm against knowledge spill-over. However, these measures are costly to instigate and police. By contrast, a key attraction of informal relationships is their low co-ordination costs. Informal know-how trading is relatively simple, uncomplicated and more flexible, and has been observed in a number of industries. A number of factors affecting firms' decisions to cooperate or not cooperate within strategic alliances have been raised in the literature. In this paper we consider three factors in particular: the relative costs of coordinating activity through strategic alliances vis-a-vis the costs of coordinating activity in-house, the degree of uncertainty present in the competitive environment, and the feedback between individual decision-making and industry structure. Whereas discussion of the first two factors is well developed in the strategic alliance literature, the third factor has hitherto only been addressed indirectly. The contribution to this under-researched area represents an important contribution of this paper to the current discourse. In order to focus the discussion, the paper considers the formation of horizontal inter-firm strategic alliances in dynamic product markets. These markets are characterised by rapid rates of technological change, a high degree of market uncertainty, and high rewards (supernormal profits) for successful firms offset by shortening life cycles.Strategic Alliances, Innovation Networks, Self-Organisation

Institutional Assessment of Transboundary Water Resources Management

human development, water, sanitation