Using incentives to analyze social web services’ behaviors

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. This paper discusses how incentives allow social networks to attract more members and reward those that are honest by retaining them. These members referred to as social Web services process users’ requests in return for a certain usage fee and also expose certain behaviors in return of the incentives they receive. The usage fee is linked to a performance level that the social Web service needs to maintain at run time. In the case of any discrepancy between the usage fee and performance level the social Web service is expected to compensate users. However the compensation might not always take place. Simulation results illustrate why honesty is rewarding for social Web services, which has a positive impact on both their performance and the performance of the networks to which they belong

The Future of Social Marketing

{Excerpt} Social marketing is the use of marketing principles and techniques to effect behavioral change. It is a concept, process, and application for understanding who people are, what they desire, and then organizing the creation, communication, and delivery of products and services to meet their desires as well as the needs of society, and solve serious social problems. Organizations have never had such powerful information and communication technologies with which to interact with clients, audiences, and partners; explore, find, capture, store, analyze, present, use, and exchange information dataand information about them; and tailor products and services accordingly. Along with that, never before have end users expected to interface so closely with organizations and with one another to define and shape what they need. In its highest form, marketing is now considered a social process, composed of human behavior patterns concerned with exchange of resources or values.It is no longer a mere function used to increase business profits

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Identification Problems in Personality Psychology

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures are determined by these multiple traits and do not identify any particular trait unless incentives and other traits are controlled for. Using two data sets, we show, as an example, that substantial portions of the variance in achievement test scores and grades, which are often used as measures of cognition, are explained by personality variables.labour economics ;

Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

Identification Problems in Personality Psychology

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures are determined by these multiple traits and do not identify any particular trait unless incentives and other traits are controlled for. Using two data sets, we show, as an example, that substantial portions of the variance in achievement test scores and grades, which are often used as measures of cognition, are explained by personality variables.identification problem; personality; psychology; achievement test; grades

Considering Human Aspects on Strategies for Designing and Managing Distributed Human Computation

A human computation system can be viewed as a distributed system in which the processors are humans, called workers. Such systems harness the cognitive power of a group of workers connected to the Internet to execute relatively simple tasks, whose solutions, once grouped, solve a problem that systems equipped with only machines could not solve satisfactorily. Examples of such systems are Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Zooniverse platform. A human computation application comprises a group of tasks, each of them can be performed by one worker. Tasks might have dependencies among each other. In this study, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze such type of application from a distributed systems point of view. Our framework is established on three dimensions that represent different perspectives in which human computation applications can be approached: quality-of-service requirements, design and management strategies, and human aspects. By using this framework, we review human computation in the perspective of programmers seeking to improve the design of human computation applications and managers seeking to increase the effectiveness of human computation infrastructures in running such applications. In doing so, besides integrating and organizing what has been done in this direction, we also put into perspective the fact that the human aspects of the workers in such systems introduce new challenges in terms of, for example, task assignment, dependency management, and fault prevention and tolerance. We discuss how they are related to distributed systems and other areas of knowledge.Comment: 3 figures, 1 tabl

States' Roles in Shaping High Performance Health Systems

Analyzes results from the State Health Policies Aimed at Promoting Excellent Systems survey and a review of current research on efforts to improve state healthcare systems, with a focus on coverage; quality, safety, and value; and infrastructure

Understanding collaboration in volunteer computing systems

Volunteer computing is a paradigm in which devices participating in a distributed environment share part of their resources to help others perform their activities. The effectiveness of this computing paradigm depends on the collaboration attitude adopted by the participating devices. Unfortunately for software designers it is not clear how to contribute with local resources to the shared environment without compromising resources that could then be required by the contributors. Therefore, many designers adopt a conservative position when defining the collaboration strategy to be embedded in volunteer computing applications. This position produces an underutilization of the devices’ local resources and reduces the effectiveness of these solutions. This article presents a study that helps designers understand the impact of adopting a particular collaboration attitude to contribute with local resources to the distributed shared environment. The study considers five collaboration strategies, which are analyzed in computing environments with both, abundance and scarcity of resources. The obtained results indicate that collaboration strategies based on effort-based incentives work better than those using contribution-based incentives. These results also show that the use of effort-based incentives does not jeopardize the availability of local resources for the local needs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version