The Limits of Blockchain Democracy

Should political elections be implemented on the blockchain? Blockchain evangelists have argued that they should. This article sheds light on the potential of blockchain voting procedures and the legal constraints they need to accommodate. In a first step, I discuss potential “democracy benefits” of distributed ledger technology and the legal framework ordering the use of electronic voting systems in general. Comparing U.S. and German constitutional law, I then distill specific normative principles guiding the use of blockchain voting systems. In a second step, I analyze the technical, economic, and normative limitations of blockchain voting procedures. I show that major limitations result from the rules and incentives set by different consensus mechanisms. Moreover, it is not clear whether blockchain technology provides sufficient safeguards to ensure identity verification, the secrecy of ballots, and the verification that ballots are cast as intended, recorded as cast, and counted as recorded. Building on principles from constitutional law, I contend that blockchain technology does not provide sufficient safeguards to satisfy the requirements of democratic voting procedures – at least not in the near future

Sharing is daring: An experiment on consent, chilling effects and a salient privacy nudge

Privacy law rests on the assumption that government surveillance may increase the general level of conformity and thus generate a chilling effect. In a study that combines elements of a lab and a field experiment, we show that salient and incentivized consent options are sufficient to trigger this behavioral effect. Salient ex ante consent options may lure people into giving up their privacy and increase their compliance with social norms – even when the only immediate risk of sharing information is mere publicity on a Google website. A right to be forgotten (right to deletion), however, seems to reduce neither privacy valuations nor chilling effects. In spite of low deletion costs people tend to stick with a retention default. The study suggests that consent architectures may play out on social conformity rather than on consent choices and privacy valuations. Salient notice and consent options may not merely empower users to make an informed consent decision. Instead, they can trigger the very effects that privacy law intends to curb

Fair Governance with Humans and Machines

How fair do people perceive government decisions based on algorithmic predictions? And to what extent can the government delegate decisions to machines without sacrificing perceived procedural fairness? Using a set of vignettes in the context of predictive policing, school admissions, and refugee-matching, we explore how different degrees of human-machine interaction affect fairness perceptions and procedural preferences. We implement four treatments varying the extent of responsibility delegation to the machine and the degree of human involvement in the decision-making process, ranging from full human discretion, machine-based predictions with high human involvement, machine-based predictions with low human involvement, and fully machine-based decisions. We find that machine-based predictions with high human involvement yield the highest and fully machine-based decisions the lowest fairness scores. Different accuracy assessments can partly explain these differences. Fairness scores follow a similar pattern across contexts, with a negative level effect and lower fairness perceptions of human decisions in the context of predictive policing. Our results shed light on the behavioral foundations of several legal human-in-the-loop rules

Philosophie und Recht in Zeiten des Terrors. Terrorismus aus Perspektiven der Philosophie: Jürgen Habermas und Jacques Derrida

Was bedeutet Terror aus philosophischer Sicht? Worin liegen die Ursachen dieses Phänomens? Und welche Rolle spielt das Völkerrecht in einer Welt, in der die Legitima- tionsgrundlagen staatlicher Gewalt und Souveränität immer stärker von privaten Ak- teuren bedroht werden. Mit diesen Fragen setzen sich Jürgen Habermas und Jacques Derrida, Vertreter der postmodernen Philosophie, in einem Gespräch mit der italienischen Philosophin Giovanna Borradori auseinander. Dieses Gespräch ist Aus- gangspunkt des vorliegenden Beitrags

Debarment and collusion in procurement auctions

This article presents the first experiment exploring the impact of debarments – the exclusion of colluding bidders – on collusion in procurement auctions. We find that debarments reduce collusion and bids relative to a market with no sanction. The deterrent effect of debarments increases in the length of the punishment. However, shorter debarments reduce efficiency and increase the bids of non-debarred bidders. This suggests that debarments that are too lenient may trigger tacit collusion among the bidders who remain in the market, thereby facilitating the very behavior they aim to deter