1,589 research outputs found
Existence of Equilibrium in Large Double Auctions
We show the existence of a pure strategy, symmetric, increasing equilibrium in double auction markets with correlated private valuations and many participants. The equilibrium we find is arbitrarily close to fully revealing as the market size grows. Our results provide strategic foundations for price-taking behavior in large markets.
What Do We Expect from Our Friends?
We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator’s demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.dictator games, beliefs, baseline altruism, directed altruism, social networks
What Do We Expect from Our Friends?
We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient be- liefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocators demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.dictator games, beliefs, baseline altruism, directed altruism, social networks
Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks
We conduct online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52 percent relative to random strangers, while future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24 percent when giving is socially efficient. This finding suggests that future interaction affects giving through a repeated game mechanism where agents can be rewarded for granting efficiency enhancing favors. We also find that subjects with higher baseline altruism have friends with higher baseline altruism.modified dictator games, directed altruism, enforced reciprocity, social networks
Emergence of robust nucleosome patterns from an interplay of positioning mechanisms
Proper positioning of nucleosomes in eukaryotic cells is determined by a complex interplay of factors, including nucleosome-nucleosome interactions, DNA sequence, and active chromatin remodeling. Yet, characteristic features of nucleosome positioning, such as geneaveraged nucleosome patterns, are surprisingly robust across perturbations, conditions, and species. Here, we explore how this robustness arises despite the underlying complexity. We leverage mathematical models to show that a large class of positioning mechanisms merely affects the quantitative characteristics of qualitatively robust positioning patterns. We demonstrate how statistical positioning emerges as an effective description from the complex interplay of different positioning mechanisms, which ultimately only renormalize the model parameter quantifying the effective softness of nucleosomes. This renormalization can be species-specific, rationalizing a puzzling discrepancy between the effective nucleosome softness of S. pombe and S. cerevisiae. More generally, we establish a quantitative framework for dissecting the interplay of different nucleosome positioning determinants
Managing Self-Confidence: Theory and Experimental Evidence
Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian updating. We implement a direct experimental test. We study a large sample of 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback from a known data-generating process. Our design lets us repeatedly measure the complete relevant belief distribution incentive-compatibly. We find that subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are causally more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a simple model of optimally biased Bayesian information processing.
Transient interfacial tension and dilatational rheology of diffuse polymer-polymer interfaces
We demonstrate the influence of molecular weight and molecular weightasymmetry across an interface on the transient behavior of the interfacial tension. The interfacial tension was measured as a function of time for a range of polymer combinations with a broadrange of interfacial properties using a pendant/ sessile drop apparatus. The results show that neglecting mutual solubility, assumed to be a reasonable approximation in many cases, very often does not sustain. Instead, a diffuse interface layer develops in time with a corresponding transient interfacial tension. Depending on the specific combination of polymers, the transient interfacial tension is found to increase or decrease with time. The results are interpreted in terms of a recently proposed model\cite{Shi_etal2004}, giving relativecharacteristic diffusion time scales in terms of molecular weight, molecular weight distribution and viscosities. However, the time scales obtained from this theoretical approach do not give a conclusive trend. Using oscillatory dilatational interfacial experiments the viscoelastic behavior of these diffusive interfaces is demonstrated. The time evolution of the interfacial tension and thedilatational elasticity show the same trend aspredicted by the theory of diffuse interfaces, supporting the idea that the polymer combinations under consideration indeed form diffuse interfaces. The dilatational elasticity and the dilatationalviscosity show a frequency dependency that is described qualitatively by a simple Fickian diffusion model and quantitatively by a Maxwell model. The characteristic diffusion times provided by the lattershow that the systems with thick interfaces (tens of micrometers and more) can be considered as slowdiffusive systems while the systems with thinner interfaces (a few micrometers and less) can be considered as fast diffusive systems
Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube
Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube
is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in
the world. Recently, YouTube's outsize influence has sparked concerns that its
recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing
content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data
of individuals' browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019.
Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for
a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated
by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for
a small but growing "echo chamber" of far-right content consumption. Users in
this community show higher engagement and greater "stickiness" than users who
consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an
increasing fraction of these users' overall online news consumption. Finally,
while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real
concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations.
Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader
patterns of news consumption across the web. Our results emphasize the
importance of measuring consumption directly rather than inferring it from
recommendations.Comment: 29 pages, 21 figures, 15 table
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