The public places more trust in scientists and politicians, when they appear individually, rather than together, to communicate Covid-19 public health measures

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians have been accompanied by scientists when communicating the need for anti-contagion measures. In this post, Mike Farjam discusses the results of a joint Italian/Swedish experiment into public attitudes towards this form of expert communication

Game against the machine: interacting with artificial economic agents

Nowadays artificial agents (robots, artificial intelligences, etc.) are part of our societies and we interact with them daily. Hybrid societies, in which human and artificial agents interact are already reality and may become the norm not the exception. Little research has been done in general with regard to hybrid societies and even less so by economists. With the help of the experimental method we try to shed light on one aspect that could make hybrid societies different from human-only societies: The expectations that humans have with regard to the different types of agents (human or artificial) they may interact with. The experiments presented in this dissertation all compare the behaviour of humans in treatments where they expect to be relying on other humans, with treatments where they rely on "non-human" mechanisms. All experiments indicate that humans condition their behaviour on the type of agent they rely on and that behaviour differs

On whom would I want to depend; humans or computers?

We study in a laboratory experiment whether humans prefer to depend on decisions of others (Human-Driven Uncertainty) or states generated by a computer (Computerized Uncertainty). The experimental design introduced in this paper is unique in that it introduces Human-Driven Uncertainty such that it does not derive from a strategic context. In our experiment, Human-Driven Uncertainty derives from decisions, which were taken in a morally neutral context and in ignorance of externalities that the decisions may have on others. Our results indicate that even without strategic interaction and moral elements humans prefer Computerized to Human-Driven Uncertainty. This holds even when the distribution of outcomes under both types of uncertainty is identical. From a methodological point of view, the findings shed a critical light on behavioral research in which it is common practice to control for strategic uncertainty by comparing interaction with an artificial agent with a known strategy to interaction with humans. Outside the laboratory, our results suggest that whenever dependence on humans is changed to dependence on computers and other kinds of “artificial” decision makers, preferences with regard to these dependencies may change too

Europeanization on Twitter? Mapping the trans-national Migration Discourse

Do social media lead to an increased Europeanization of the digital public discourse and, thereby, help develop a more integrated European-level political body? This paper probes the existence of a Europeanized public discourse on Twitter on the issue of migration. We analyze ~5,000,000 tweets from the period 2014-2019, in nine different languages and chart the connections and the content using a triangulation of methods: network mapping, qualitative coding, and statistical modeling. We operationalize Europeanization through language and define Europeanization as occurring when non-native English users tweet in English to reach users outside their own language sphere. Our conclusions are that 1) there is a Europeanized discourse on migration on Twitter; 2) the process is driven primarily through uploading and to a lesser extent via downloading of messages to and from Europeans’ digital shared sphere of communication; and 3) the most active actors in the process display views critical to migration. In addition, we discover a clear polarization of allegiances within the trans-national European sphere with those opposed to migration creating a strongly bonded cluster, clearly separated from those either supportive or neutral in the matter

Ignorance Is Bliss, But for Whom? The Persistent Effect of Good Will on Cooperation

Who benefits from the ignorance of others? We address this question from the point of view of a policy maker who can induce some ignorance into a system of agents competing for resources. Evolutionary game theory shows that when unconditional cooperators or ignorant agents compete with defectors in two-strategy settings, unconditional cooperators get exploited and are rendered extinct. In contrast, conditional cooperators, by utilizing some kind of reciprocity, are able to survive and sustain cooperation when competing with defectors. We study how cooperation thrives in a three-strategy setting where there are unconditional cooperators, conditional cooperators and defectors. By means of simulation on various kinds of graphs, we show that conditional cooperators benefit from the existence of unconditional cooperators in the majority of cases. However, in worlds that make cooperation hard to evolve, defectors benefit

Investing into climate change mitigation despite the risk of failure

This dataset is the base of the paper "Investing into climate change mitigation despite the risk of failure

Replication Data for Experimental evidence of the bandwagon effect on voting

Dataset and R-script needed to reproduce our analysis

Common paths in long-term institutional dynamics: An analysis of rule changes in British and Dutch commons over seven centuries

This is the dataset and the R-script with which tables and figures of the paper "Common paths in long-term institutional dynamics: An analysis of rule changes in British and Dutch commons over seven centuries" can be reproduced