Objective and Subjective Responsibility of a Control-Room Worker

When working with AI and advanced automation, human responsibility for outcomes becomes equivocal. We applied a newly developed responsibility quantification model (ResQu) to the real world setting of a control room in a dairy factory to calculate workers' objective responsibility in a common fault scenario. We compared the results to the subjective assessments made by different functions in the diary. The capabilities of the automation greatly exceeded those of the human, and the optimal operator should have fully complied with the indications of the automation. Thus, in this case, the operator had no unique contribution, and the objective causal human responsibility was zero. However, outside observers, such as managers, tended to assign much higher responsibility to the operator, in a manner that resembled aspects of the "fundamental attribution error". This, in turn, may lead to unjustifiably holding operators responsible for adverse outcomes in situations in which they rightly trusted the automation, and acted accordingly. We demonstrate the use of the ResQu model for the analysis of human causal responsibility in intelligent systems. The model can help calibrate exogenous subjective responsibility attributions, aid system design, and guide policy and legal decisions

Barnes Hospital Bulletin

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/bjc_barnes_bulletin/1104/thumbnail.jp

Fight for your alienation: The fantasy of employability and the ironic struggle for self-exploitation

This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, to introduce employability as a cultural fantasy that organizes identity around the desire to shape, exploit and ultimately profit from an employable self. Specifically, the paper shows how individuals seek to overcome their subjective and material alienation by maximizing their self-exploitation through constantly enhancing their employability. This linking of empowerment to selfexploitation has expanded into a broader organizational and political demand calling on individuals to fight for their alienation by having managers and governments help them better exploit themselves through enhancing their employability. Paradoxically, the more contemporary subjects aim to overcome their subjective and material alienation through fantasies of employability the more alienated they become

Lighting, well-being and work performance: A review of the literature

Commissioned White Paper Report for Philips International

Study on Housing Exclusion: Welfare Policies, Housing Provision and Labour Markets

This is a six country comparative study of the relationship between housing, welfare states and labour markets. The study employs both quantitative (using EU-SILC) and qualitative data

Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork

We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help, identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori. Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are, to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW \c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe

Preferences for redistribution : an empirical analysis

People's preferences for state intervention in social policies vary. A cross-section analysis on individual-level survey data is conducted here to highlight the link between the economic position of agents and their specific demand for redistribution. Controlling for a number of factors usually found to affect individual preferences in the literature, the egoistic motives for redistribution are taken seriously and this article focuses on the role played by the occupational status of individuals in shaping their preferences. Thus, the relative importance of economic factors in terms of current and expected gains is estimated, taking into account individuals' experience of social mobility and risk aversion. Furthermore, the research presented here identifies which socio-political groups may be formed on the basis of their preferences for redistribution.Redistribution, occupation, social mobility, ordered logit regression.

Quality of care: testing some measures in homes for elderly people

In this national study of 17 residential homes, 309 residents were interviewed, 264 members of staff completed an anonymous survey, and 228 relatives responded to a postal questionnaire. The data were collected between January andSeptember 1995. The aim of the study was to suggest promising measures of quality of care, looking particularly at depression as a possible indicator. It also served as a follow-up study of the Caring in Homes Initiative, although its timing ruled out evaluation of the impact of this development programme, because changes occurred in the homes before this study began. No strict definition of quality was adopted a priori, but a pragmatic approach was taken, addressing the perspectives of residents, health and social care professionals, home staff, managers, and relatives

A little less autonomy? The future of working time flexibility and its limits

The European Court of Justice has recently issued rulings on the interpretation of the European Working Time Directive 2003/88, which appear to restrict flexible working time arrangements(especially Matzak C-518/15,Syndicat C-254/18 and CCOOC-55/18). Only a few months prior tothe latter ruling of the CJEU, the Austrian legislator amended the Working Time Act in orderto make it more flexible. The article argues that the measures taken by the Austrian legislator toenable more flexibility and autonomy can still be regarded as compatible with Union law. In general,the article tackles the question of possible further legislative developments in order to strike abalance between autonomy and the need for security of both parties to the employment relationship. Among other suggestions, the article introduces the concept of molecularisation ofworking time and examines whether work intensity should be introduced as a qualitativedimension to the concept of working time, thus deviating from the current European WorkingTime Directive. Finally, the article suggests security measures – often referring to Austria as a bestpractice example – in order to safeguard workers in view of working time flexibility