Actors and factors - bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling

Recent uneven land use dynamics in urban areas resulting from demographic change, economic pressure and the cities’ mutual competition in a globalising world challenge both scientists and practitioners, among them social scientists, modellers and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment, the requirements of the residents on social and natural resources. Social and environmental research is interested in a better understanding and ways of explaining the interactions between society and landscape in urban areas. And it is also needed for making life in cities attractive, secure and affordable within or despite of uneven dynamics.\ud The position paper upon “Actors and factors – bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling” presents approaches and ideas on how social science findings on the interaction of the social system (actors) and the land use (factors) are taken up and formalised using modelling and gaming techniques. It should be understood as a first sketch compiling major challenges and proposing exemplary solutions in the field of interest

Spatial Economic Analysis in Data-Rich Environments

Controlling for spatial effects in micro-economic studies of consumer and producer behavior necessitates a range of analytical modifications ranging from modest changes in data collection and the definition of variables to dramatic changes in the modeling of consumer and producer decision-making. This paper discusses conceptual, empirical, and data issues involved in modeling the spatial aspects of economic behavior in data rich environments. Attention is given to established and emerging agricultural economic applications of spatial data and spatial econometric methods at the micro-scale. Recent applications of individual and household data are featured, including models of land-use change at the urban-rural interface, agricultural land values, and technological change and technology adoption.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, C21, Q10, Q12, Q15, Q56,

POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies

Algorithmic fairness aims to address the economic, moral, social, and political impact that digital systems have on populations through solutions that can be applied by service providers. Fairness frameworks do so, in part, by mapping these problems to a narrow definition and assuming the service providers can be trusted to deploy countermeasures. Not surprisingly, these decisions limit fairness frameworks' ability to capture a variety of harms caused by systems. We characterize fairness limitations using concepts from requirements engineering and from social sciences. We show that the focus on algorithms' inputs and outputs misses harms that arise from systems interacting with the world; that the focus on bias and discrimination omits broader harms on populations and their environments; and that relying on service providers excludes scenarios where they are not cooperative or intentionally adversarial. We propose Protective Optimization Technologies (POTs). POTs provide means for affected parties to address the negative impacts of systems in the environment, expanding avenues for political contestation. POTs intervene from outside the system, do not require service providers to cooperate, and can serve to correct, shift, or expose harms that systems impose on populations and their environments. We illustrate the potential and limitations of POTs in two case studies: countering road congestion caused by traffic-beating applications, and recalibrating credit scoring for loan applicants.Comment: Appears in Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* 2020). Bogdan Kulynych and Rebekah Overdorf contributed equally to this work. Version v1/v2 by Seda G\"urses, Rebekah Overdorf, and Ero Balsa was presented at HotPETS 2018 and at PiMLAI 201

Determinants of agricultural protection from an international perspective: The role of political institutions

"This paper explores the role of political institutions in determining the ability of agriculture to avoid taxation in developing countries or attract government transfers in industrialized countries. The utilized model is based on a probabilistic voting environment, wherein rural districts are less ideologically committed than urban districts in industrialized countries, and the reverse is true in developing countries. As a consequence, in industrialized (developing) countries rural (urban) districts are pivotal in determining the coalition that obtains a majority, whereas urban (rural) districts are pivotal within the majority itself. In bargaining at the level of the legislature, this generates a conflict between a government that tends to favor rural (urban) districts, and a parliamentary majority that is dominated by urban (rural) concerns. As district size grows and the electoral system converges to a purely proportional system, both of these biases are attenuated. Overall, we see opposing nonlinear relationships between district size and agricultural subsidies on the one hand and district size and taxation on the other. In developing countries, taxation of agriculture first increases and then decreases with district magnitude; in industrialized countries, agricultural subsidization first increases and then decreases with district magnitude. Moreover, the impact of district magnitude on the level of agricultural subsidization is attenuated in presidential versus parliamentary systems, while the level of agricultural taxation is amplified in presidential systems. In the present paper, these findings are first theorized and then empirically confirmed by a cross-country analysis of data from 37 countries over a 20-year period." from authors' abstractpolitical economy of agricultural protectionism, Agricultural policies, Urban-rural differences, political institutions,

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of e.cient truthful common-agency equilibria has measure zero. Equilibria are generally inefficient as a direct result of the existence of groups with conflicting interests, which allocate real resources to lobbying. If lobbies representing "the poor " and "the rich " have identical organizational capacities, we show that these equilibria are biased towards the poor, who have a comparative advantage in politics, rather than in production. If the pressure groups di.er in their organizational capacity, both pro-rich (oligarchic) and pro-poor (populist) equilibria may arise, all of which are inefficient with respect to the constrained optimum.

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

The authors investigate the theoretical effects of lobbying and pressure group activities on both economic efficiency and on equity. Looking at lobbying as a political activity that takes place alongside production, they find that lobbies may generate economic inefficiency as part of the process of shifting the allocation of government expenditures in their favor. Outcomes of this non-electoral political process will always be biased toward the group with a comparative advantage in politics, rather than in production. In a context where the main political conflict is one between"the rich"and"the poor,"political equilibria may be either populist (inefficiently pro-poor) or oligarchic (inefficiently pro-rich), depending on each group's lobbying effectiveness.Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,ICT Policy and Strategies,Knowledge Economy

Agent-based models and individualism: is the world agent-based?

Agent-based models (ABMs) are an increasingly popular tool in the social sciences. This trend seems likely to continue, so that they will become widely used in geography and in urban and regional planning. We present an overview of examples of these models in the life sciences, economics, planning, sociology, and archaeology. We conclude that ABMs strongly tend towards an individualist view of the social world. This point is reinforced by closer consideration of particular examples. This discussion pays attention to the inadequacy of an individualist model of society with reference to debates in social theory. We argue that because models are closed representations of an open world it is important that institutions and other social structures be explicitly included, or that their omission be explained. A tentative explanation for the bias of ABMs is offered, based on an examination of early research in artificial intelligence and distributed artificial intelligence from which disciplines the approach is derived. Some implications of these findings are discussed. We indicate some useful research directions which are beginning to tackle the individualism issue directly. We further note that the underlying assumptions of ABMs are often hidden in the implementation details. We conclude that such models must be subject to critical examination of their assumptions, and that model builders should engage with social theory if the approach is to realise its full potential

Labor Migration and Social Networks Participation: Evidence from Southern Mozambique

There is a large literature pointing to community participation and social networks as salient components of household well-being in developing settings. Yet, there are few insights into whether people mobility affects incentive problems associated with social networks, or whether labor migration displaces social informal institutions in village economies at origin. This paper directly tests the role of international migration in shaping participation in groups and social networks by migrant sending households in village economies at origin. By using an original household survey from two southern regions in Mozambique, we find that households with successful migrants (i.e. those receiving either remittances or return migration) engage more in community based social networks. Our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant-sending communities.International Migration, Social Capital, Networks, Group Participation, Mozambique