Activism against Nostalgia and Self-Defeatism

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Experimental Study of Cryptocurrency Market Dynamics

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and credibility, marketplaces for cryptocurrencies are growing in importance. Understanding the dynamics of these markets can help to assess how viable the cryptocurrnency ecosystem is and how design choices affect market behavior. One existential threat to cryptocurrencies is dramatic fluctuations in traders' willingness to buy or sell. Using a novel experimental methodology, we conducted an online experiment to study how susceptible traders in these markets are to peer influence from trading behavior. We created bots that executed over one hundred thousand trades costing less than a penny each in 217 cryptocurrencies over the course of six months. We find that individual "buy" actions led to short-term increases in subsequent buy-side activity hundreds of times the size of our interventions. From a design perspective, we note that the design choices of the exchange we study may have promoted this and other peer influence effects, which highlights the potential social and economic impact of HCI in the design of digital institutions.Comment: CHI 201

Quantifying the Impact of Cognitive Biases in Question-Answering Systems

Crowdsourcing can identify high-quality solutions to problems; however, individual decisions are constrained by cognitive biases. We investigate some of these biases in an experimental model of a question-answering system. In both natural and controlled experiments, we observe a strong position bias in favor of answers appearing earlier in a list of choices. This effect is enhanced by three cognitive factors: the attention an answer receives, its perceived popularity, and cognitive load, measured by the number of choices a user has to process. While separately weak, these effects synergistically amplify position bias and decouple user choices of best answers from their intrinsic quality. We end our paper by discussing the novel ways we can apply these findings to substantially improve how high-quality answers are found in question-answering systems.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Modeling consumer behaviour in the presence of network effects

Consumer choice models are a key component in fields such as Revenue Management and Transport Logistics, where the demands for certain products or services are assumed to follow a particular form, and sellers or market-makers use that information to adjust their strategies accordingly, choosing for example which products to display (assortment problem) or their prices (pricing problem). In the last couple of decades, online markets have taken a lot of relevance, providing a setting where consumers can compare easily different products, before deciding to buy them. More information is now available, and the purchasing decisions not only depend on the quality, prices and availability of the products, but also on what previous consumers think about them (phenomenon commonly known as Network Effects). Hence, in order to create a suitable model for this kind of market, it is relevant to understand how the collective decisions affect the market evolution. In this thesis we consider a particular subset of those online markets, cultural markets, where the products are for example songs, video games or ebooks. This kind of market has the special feature that its products have unlimited supply (since they are just a digital copy), and therefore we can exploit this in our models, to justify assumptions of the asymptotic behaviour of the market. We study some variations of the traditional Multinomial Logit (MNL) model, characterising the behaviour of consumers, where their purchasing decisions are affected by the quality and prices (initially fixed) of the available products, as well as their visibilities in the market interface and the consumption patterns of previous users. We focus particularly on the parameters associated to the network effects, where depending on the strength of the network effects, it is possible to explain: herd behaviours, where an alternative overpowers the rest; as well as more well-distributed settings, where all the alternatives receive enough attention giving a notion of fairness, since higher quality products get a larger market share. Finally, using the model where market shares are distributed according to the quality of the products, we study pricing strategies, where sellers can either collaborate or compete. We analyse the effect of both type of strategies into the choice model

Riscophrenia and "animal spirits": clarifying the notions of risk and uncertainty in environmental problems

This article seeks to clarify the concepts of risk and uncertainty, restricting its focus to environmental problems and to three strands of reflection. Firstly, I suggest that we should apply the label riscophrenia to the tendency to envisage most environmental problems excessively in terms of probabilistic risk, erecting the concept to a core dogma of certainty based on the image it offers of (alleged) safety and control of the random. Looking at the most serious environmental problems of the twenty-first century through the prism of "animal spirits" is above all an exercise which shows that unpredictability and uncertainties are constituent elements of human existence and social life. Secondly, I argue that the assessment of uncertainty has political and normative implications. I hold that uncertainty may make it possible to invoke precautionary, not just preventive, measures, and that alternative "contextualised" research strategies, open to a variety of points of view, are possible. Lastly, I claim that the language of risk and its excessive application is generally laden with a type of ambiguity which tends not to emphasize society's current problems, and so facilitates the continuation rather than the questioning of our society's dominant technocratic and technological model

The role of culture in stakeholder engagement: its implication for open innovation.

Appropriate and effective stakeholder engagement remains a critical success factor for successful project and project management, especially in multicultural settings such as in the case of international subsidiaries of multinational organisations. Using in-depth qualitative interviews, this study examines the influence of culture on stakeholder engagement in a multicultural context from the perspective of project practitioners working for multinational corporations in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. The study findings revealed how the influence of different cultural dimensions on stakeholder engagement impact policies and decision-making. The study emphasised the need for project practitioners to integrate a culture that fosters open innovation in their project implementation processes to enhance their capacity to engage effectively in a multicultural setting

And For Law: Why Space cannot be understood without Law

Doreen Massey, the iconic political geographer, whose book For Space has influenced the way various disciplines understand space, has largely ignored law in her work. In fact, just as most non-legal scholars she replaces law with politics. Here, I read Massey through law, arguing that often, non-legal writing is characterized by a misapprehension of the law. Through an analysis of her arguments against some understandings of space (such as systemic, negative, closed, textual), I mount a critique against the standard understandings of law (as precisely all these things) and suggest instead a lawscaping way of understanding the connection between law and space, as well as issues of spatial justice and responsibility

Popularity signals in trial-offer markets with social influence and position bias

This paper considers trial-offer markets where consumer preferences are modelled by a multinomial logit with social influence and position bias. The social signal for a product is given by its current market share raised to power r (or, equivalently, the number of purchases raised to the power of r). The paper shows that, when r is strictly between 0 and 1, and a static position assignment (e.g., a quality ranking) is used, the market converges to a unique equilibrium where the market shares depend only on product quality, not their initial appeals or the early dynamics. When r is greater than 1, the market becomes unpredictable. In many cases, the market goes to a monopoly for some product: which product becomes a monopoly depends on the initial conditions of the market. These theoretical results are complemented by an agent-based simulation which indicates that convergence is fast when r is between 0 and 1, and that the quality ranking dominates the well-known popularity ranking in terms of market efficiency. These results shed a new light on the role of social influence which is often blamed for unpredictability, inequalities, and inefficiencies in markets. In contrast, this paper shows that, with a proper social signal and position assignment for the products, the market becomes predictable, and inequalities and inefficiencies can be controlled appropriately