Rational Inattention: A Disciplined Behavioral Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bartosz Mackowiak, Filip Matejka and Mirko Wiederholt: “This survey paper argues that rational inattention matters. It is likely to become an important part of Economics, because it bridges a gap between classical economics and behavioral economics. Actions look behavioral, since agents cannot process all available information; yet agents optimize in the sense that they try to deal optimally with their cognitive limitations – hence the term ”rational inattention.” We show how rational inattention describes the adaptation of agents’ behavioral biases due to policy and other changes of the economic environment. Then, we survey the existing literature, and discuss what the unifying mechanisms behind the results in these papers are. Finally, we lay out implications for policy, and propose what we believe are the most fruitful steps for future research in this area. Economics is about adjustments to scarcity.

Rational inattention studies adjustments to scarcity of attention. Understanding how people summarize, filter, and digest the abundant available information is key to understanding many phenomena in economics. Several crucial findings in economics, even some whole subfields, have been built around the assumptions of imperfect or asymmetric information. However, nowadays, many more forms of information than ever before are available due to new technologies, yet we are able to digest little of it. Which form of imperfect information we possess and act upon is thus largely not determined by which information is given to us, but by which information we choose to attend to….(More)”.

Doing Research In and On the Digital: Research Methods across Fields of Inquiry

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Book edited by Cristina Costa and Jenna Condie: “As a social space, the web provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the ‘digital’ has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how, where and, why to conduct social research.

Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches.

In two core Parts, this collection explores:

  • content collection: methods for harvesting digital data
  • engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories .

With contributions from a diverse range of fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, healthcare and psychology, this volume will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and early career researchers who are navigating through new terrain in their digital-mediated research endeavours….(More)”.

EU ministers endorse Commission’s plans for research cloud

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European Commission: “The European Open Science Cloud, which will support EU science in its global leading by creating a trusted environment for hosting and processing research data, is one important step closer to becoming a reality. Meeting in Brussels today, EU research ministers endorsed the roadmap for its creation. The Conclusions of the Competitiveness Council, proposed by the current Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, are the result of two years of intense negotiations….

According to Commissioner Moedas, much remains to be done to make the EOSC a reality by 2020, but several important aspects stand out:

  1. the Cloud should be a wide, pan-European federation of existing and emerging excellent infrastructures, which respects the governance and funding mechanisms of its components;
  2. membership in this federation would be voluntary; and
  3. the governance structure would include member state ministries, stakeholders and scientists.

 

…In another important step for Open Science, the Commission published today the final recommendations of the Open Science Policy Platform. Established in 2016, the platform comprises important stakeholders who advise the Commission on how to further develop and practically implement Open Science policy in order to improve radically the quality and impact of European science….(More)”.

Information to Action: Strengthening EPA Citizen Science Partnerships for Environmental Protection

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Report by the National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology: “Citizen science is catalyzing collaboration; new data and information brought about by greater public participation in environmental research are helping to drive a new era of environmental protection. As the body of citizen-generated data and information in the public realm continues to grow, EPA must develop a clear strategy to lead change and encourage action beyond the collection of data. EPA should recognize the variety of opportunities that it has to act as a conduit between the public and key partners, including state, territorial, tribal and local governments; nongovernmental organizations; and leading technology groups in the private sector. The Agency should build collaborations with new partners, identify opportunities to integrate equity into all relationships, and ensure that grassroots and community-based organizations are well supported and fairly resourced in funding strategies.

Key recommendations under this theme:

  • Recommendation 1. Catalyze action from citizen science data and information by providing guidance and leveraging collaboration.
  • Recommendation 2. Build inclusive and equitable partnerships by understanding partners’ diverse concerns and needs, including prioritizing better support for grassroots and community-based partnerships in EPA grantfunding strategies.

Increase state, territorial, tribal and local government engagement with citizen science

The Agency should reach out to tribes, states, territories and local governments throughout the country to understand the best practices and strategies for encouraging and incorporating citizen science in environmental protection. For states and territories looking for ways to engage in citizen science, EPA can help design strategies that recognize the community perspectives while building capacity in state and territorial governments. Recognizing the direct Executive Summary Information to Action: Strengthening EPA Citizen Science Partnerships for Environmental Protection connection between EPA and tribes, the Agency should seek tribal input and support tribes in using citizen science for environmental priorities. EPA should help to increase awareness for citizen science and where jurisdictional efforts already exist, assist in making citizen science accessible through local government agencies. EPA should more proactively listen to the voices of local stakeholders and encourage partners to embrace a vision for citizen science to accelerate the achievement of environmental goals. As part of this approach, EPA should find ways to define and communicate the Agency’s role as a resource in helping communities achieve environmental outcomes.

Key recommendations under this theme:

  • Recommendation 3. Provide EPA support and engage states and territories to better integrate citizen science into program goals.
  • Recommendation 4. Build on the unique strengths of EPA-tribal relationships.
  • Recommendation 5. Align EPA citizen science work to the priorities of local governments.

Leverage external organizations for expertise and project level support

Collaborations between communities and other external organizations—including educational institutions, civic organizations, and community-based organizations— are accelerating the growth of citizen science. Because EPA’s direct connection with members of the public often is limited, the Agency could benefit significantly by consulting with key external organizations to leverage citizen science efforts to provide the greatest benefit for the protection of human health and the environment. EPA should look to external organizations as vital connections to communities engaged in collaboratively led scientific investigation to address community-defined questions, referred to as community citizen science. External organizations can help EPA in assessing gaps in community-driven research and help the Agency to design effective support tools and best management practices for facilitating effective environmental citizen science programs….(More)”.

The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward

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Book by Stanley Litow that seeks to provide “A roadmap to improve corporate social responsibility”:  “The 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign focused a good deal of attention on the role of corporations in society, from both sides of the aisle. In the lead up to the election, big companies were accused of profiteering, plundering the environment, and ignoring (even exacerbating) societal ills ranging from illiteracy and discrimination to obesity and opioid addiction. Income inequality was laid squarely at the feet of us companies. The Trump administration then moved swiftly to scrap fiscal, social, and environmental rules that purportedly hobble business, to redirect or shut down cabinet offices historically protecting the public good, and to roll back clean power, consumer protection, living wage, healthy eating initiatives and even basic public funding for public schools. To many eyes, and the lens of history, this may usher in a new era of cowboy capitalism with big companies, unfettered by regulation and encouraged by the presidential bully pulpit, free to go about the business of making money—no matter the consequences to consumers and the commonwealth. While this may please some companies in the short term, the long term consequences might result in just the opposite.

And while the new administration promises to reduce “foreign aid” and the social safety net, Stanley S. Litow believes big companies will be motivated to step up their efforts to create jobs, reduce poverty, improve education and health, and address climate change issues — both domestically and around the world. For some leaders in the private sector this is not a matter of public relations or charity. It is integral to their corporate strategy—resulting in creating new markets, reducing risks, attracting and retaining top talent, and generating growth and realizing opportunities. Through case studies (many of which the author spearheaded at IBM), The Challenge for Business and Society provides clear guidance for companies to build their own corporate sustainability and social responsibility plans positively effecting their bottom lines producing real return on their investments….(More).

On Dimensions of Citizenship

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Introduction by Niall Atkinson, Ann Lui, and Mimi Zeiger to a Special Exhibit and dedicated set of Essays: “We begin by defining citizenship as a cluster of rights, responsibilities, and attachments, and by positing their link to the built environment. Of course architectural examples of this affiliation—formal articulations of inclusion and exclusion—can seem limited and rote. The US-Mexico border wall (“The Wall,” to use common parlance) dominates the cultural imagination. As an architecture of estrangement, especially when expressed as monolithic prototypes staked in the San Diego-Tijuana landscape, the border wall privileges the rhetorical security of nationhood above all other definitions of citizenship—over the individuals, ecologies, economies, and communities in the region. And yet, as political theorist Wendy Brown points out, The Wall, like its many counterparts globally, is inherently fraught as both a physical infrastructure and a nationalist myth, ultimately racked by its own contradictions and paradoxes.

Calling border walls across the world “an ad hoc global landscape of flows and barriers,” Brown writes of the paradoxes that riddle any effort to distinguish the nation as a singular, cohesive form: “[O]ne irony of late modern walling is that a structure taken to mark and enforce an inside/outside distinction—a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and between friend and enemy—appears precisely the opposite when grasped as part of a complex of eroding lines between the police and the military, subject and patria, vigilante and state, law and lawlessness.”1 While 2018 is a moment when ideologies are most vociferously cast in binary rhetoric, the lived experience of citizenship today is rhizomic, overlapping, and distributed. A person may belong and feel rights and responsibilities to a neighborhood, a voting district, remain a part of an immigrant diaspora even after moving away from their home country, or find affiliation on an online platform. In 2017, Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, reported a user community of 46 million people across their international server network. Thus, today it is increasingly possible to simultaneously occupy multiple spaces of citizenship independent from the delineation of a formal boundary.

Conflict often makes visible emergent spaces of citizenship, as highlighted by recent acts both legislative and grassroots. Gendered bathrooms act as renewed sites of civil rights debate. Airports illustrate the thresholds of national control enacted by the recent Muslim bans. Such clashes uncover old scar tissue, violent histories and geographies of spaces. The advance of the Keystone XL pipeline across South Dakota, for example, brought the fight for indigenous sovereignty to the fore.

If citizenship itself designates a kind of border and the networks that traverse and ultimately elude such borders, then what kind of architecture might Dimensions of Citizenship offer in lieu of The Wall? What designed object, building, or space might speak to the heart of what and how it means to belong today? The participants in the United States Pavilion offer several of the clear and vital alternatives deemed so necessary by Samuel R. Delany: The Cobblestone. The Space Station. The Watershed.

Dimensions of Citizenship argues that citizenship is indissociable from the built environment, which is exactly why that relationship can be the source for generating or supporting new forms of belonging. These new forms may be more mutable and ephemeral, but no less meaningful and even, perhaps, ultimately more equitable. Through commissioned projects, and through film, video artworks, and responsive texts, Dimensions of Citizenship exhibits the ways that architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, and writers explore the changing form of citizenship: the different dimensions it can assume (legal, social, emotional) and the different dimensions (both actual and virtual) in which citizenship takes place. The works are valuably enigmatic, wide-ranging, even elusive in their interpretations, which is what contemporary conditions seem to demand. More often than not, the spaces of citizenship under investigation here are marked by histories of inequality and the violence imposed on people, non-human actors, ecologies. Our exhibition features spaces and individuals that aim to manifest the democratic ideals of inclusion against the grain of broader systems: new forms of “sharing economy” platforms, the legacies of the Underground Railroad, tenuous cross-national alliances at the border region, or the seemingly Sisyphean task of buttressing coastline topologies against the rising tides….(More)”.

Israeli, French Politicians Endorse Blockchain for Governance Transparency

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Komfie Manolo at Cryptovest: “Blockchain is moving into the world’s political systems, with several influential political figures in Israel and France recently emerging as new believers in the technology. They are betting on blockchain for more transparent governance and have joined the decentralized platform developed by Coalichain.

Among the seven Israeli politicians to endorse the platform are former deputy minister and interior minister Eli Yishay, deputy defense minister Eli Ben-Dan, and HaBait HaYehudi leader Shulamit Mualem-Refaeli. The move for a more accountable democracy has also been supported by Frederic Lefebvre, the founder of French political party Agir.

Levi Samama, co-founder and CEO of Coalichain, said that support for the platform was “a positive indication that politicians are actively seeking ways to be transparent and direct in the way they communicate with the public. In order to impact existing governance mechanisms we need the support and engagement of politicians and citizens alike.”

Acceptance of blockchain is gaining traction in the world of politics.

During last month’s presidential election in Russia, blockchain was used by state-run public opinion research center VTSIOM to track exit polls.

In the US, budding political group Indie Party wants to redefine the country’s political environment by providing an alternative to the established two-party system with a political marketplace that uses blockchain and cryptocurrency….(More)”

Health Citizenship: A New Social Contract To Improve The Clinical Trial Process

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Essay by Cynthia Grossman  and Tanisha Carino: “…We call this new social contract health citizenship, which includes a set of implied rights and responsibilities for all parties.

Three fundamental truths underpin our efforts:

  1. The path to better health and the advancement of science begin and end with engaged patients.
  2. The biomedical research enterprise lives all around us — in clinical trials, the data in our wearables, electronic health records, and data used for payment.
  3. The stakeholders that fuel advancement — clinicians, academia, government, the private sector, and investors — must create a system focused on speeding medical research and ensuring that patients have appropriate access to treatments.

To find tomorrow’s cures, treatments, and prevention measures, every aspect of society needs to get involved. Health citizenship recognizes that the future of innovative research and development depends on both patients and the formal healthcare system stepping up to the plate.

Moving Toward A Culture Of Transparency  

Increasing clinical trials registration and posting of research results are steps in the direction of transparency. Access to information about clinical trials — enrollment criteria, endpoints, locations, and results — is critical to empowering patients, their families, and primary care physicians. Also, transparency has a cascading impact on the cost and speed of scientific discovery, through ensuring validation and reproducibility of results…..

Encouraging Data Sharing

Data is the currency of biomedical research, and now patients are poised to contribute more of it than ever. In fact, many patients who participate in clinical research expect that their data will be shared and want to be partners, not just participants, in how data is used to advance the science and clinical practice that impact their disease or condition.

Engaging more patients in data sharing is only one part of what is needed to advance a data-sharing ecosystem. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) conducted a consensus study that details the challenges to clinical trial data sharing. Out of that study spun a new data-sharing platform, Vivli, which will publicly launch this year. The New England Journal of Medicine took an important step toward demonstrating the value of sharing clinical trial data through its SPRINT Data Challenge, where it opened up a data set and supported projects that sought to derive new insights from the existing data. Examples like these will go a long way toward demonstrating the value of data sharing to advancing science, academic careers, and, most importantly, patient health.

As the technology to share clinical trial data improves, it will become less of an impediment than aligning incentives. The academic environment incentivizes researchers through first author and top-tier journal publications, which contribute to investigators holding on to clinical trial data. A recent publication suggests a way to ensure academic credit, through publication credit, for sharing data sets and allows investigators to tag data sets with unique IDs.

While this effort could assist in incentivizing data sharing, we see the value of tagging data sets as a way to rapidly gather examples of the value of data sharing, including what types of data sets are taken up for analysis and what types of analyses or actions are most valuable. This type of information is currently missing, and, without the value proposition, it is difficult to encourage data sharing behavior.

The value of clinical trial data will need to be collectively reexamined through embracing the sharing of data both across clinical trials and combined with other types of data. Similar to the airline and car manufacturing industries sharing data in support of public safety,7 as more evidence is gathered to support the impact of clinical trial data sharing and as the technology is developed to do this safely and securely, the incentives, resources, and equity issues will need to be addressed collectively…(More)”.

The DNA Data We Have Is Too White. Scientists Want to Fix That

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Sarah Elizabeth Richards at Smithsonian: “We live in the age of big DNA data. Scientists are eagerly sequencing millions of human genomes in the hopes of gleaning information that will revolutionize health care as we know it, from targeted cancer therapies to personalized drugs that will work according to your own genetic makeup.

There’s a big problem, however: the data we have is too white. The vast majority of participants in worldwide genomics research are of European descent. This disparity could potentially leave out minorities from benefitting from the windfall of precision medicine. “It’s hard to tailor treatments for people’s unique needs, if the people who are suffering from those diseases aren’t included in the studies,” explains Jacquelyn Taylor, associate professor in nursing who researches health equity at New York University.

That’s about to change with the “All of Us” initiative, an ambitious health research endeavor by the National Institutes of Health that launches in May. Originally created in 2015 under President Obama as the Precision Medicine Initiative, the project aims to collect data from at least 1 million people of all ages, races, sexual identities, income and education levels. Volunteers will be asked to donate their DNA, complete health surveys and wear fitness and blood pressure trackers to offer clues about the interplay of their stats, their genetics and their environment….(More)”.

Online gamers control trash collecting water robot

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Springwise: “Urban Rivers is a Chicago-based charity focused on cleaning up the city’s rivers and re-wilding bankside habitats. One of their most visible pieces of work is a floating habitat installed in the middle of the river that runs through the city. An immediate problem that arose after installation was the accumulation of trash. At first, the company sent someone out on a kayak every other day to clean the habitat. Yet in less than a day, huge amounts of garbage would again be choking the space. The company’s solution was to create a Trash Task Force. The outcome of the Task Force’s work is the TrashBot, a remote-controlled garbage-collecting robot. The TrashBot allows gamers all over the world to do their bit in cleaning up Chicago’s river.

Anyone interested in playing the cleaning game can sign up via the Urban River website. Future development of the bot will likely focus on wildlife monitoring. Similarly, the end goal of the game will be that no one wants to play because there is no more garbage for collection.

From crowdsourced ocean data gathered by the fins of surfers’ boards to a solar-powered autonomous drone that gathers waste from harbor waters, the health of the world’s waterways is being improved in a number of ways. The surfboard fins use sensors to monitor sea salinity, acidity levels and wave motion. Those are all important coastal ecosystem factors that could be affected by climate change. The water drones are intelligent and use on-board cameras and sensors to learn about their environment and avoid other craft as they collect garbage from rivers, canals and harbors….(More)”.