Alexander J Stewart at The Conversation: “Why do people cooperate? This isn’t a question anyone seriously asks. The answer is obvious: we cooperate because doing so is usually synergistic. It creates more benefit for less cost and makes our lives easier and better.
Maybe it’s better to ask why don’t people always cooperate. But the answer here seems obvious too. We don’t do so if we think we can get away with it. If we can save ourselves the effort of working with someone else but still gain the benefits of others’ cooperation. And, perhaps, we withhold cooperation as punishment for others’ past refusal to collaborate with us.
Since there are good reasons to cooperate – and good reasons not to do so – we are left with a question without an obvious answer: under what conditions will people cooperate?
Despite its seeming simplicity, this question is very complicated, from both a theoretical and an experimental point of view. The answer matters a great deal to anyone trying to create an environment that fosters cooperation, from corporate managers and government bureaucrats to parents of unruly siblings.
New research into game theory I’ve conducted with Joshua Plotkin offers some answers – but raises a lot of questions of its own too.
Traditionally, research into game theory – the study of strategic decision making – focused either on whether a rational player should cooperate in a one-off interaction or on looking for the “winning solutions” that allow an individual who wants to cooperate make the best decisions across repeated interactions.
Our more recent inquiries aim to understand the subtle dynamics of behavioral change when there are an infinite number of potential strategies (much like life) and the game payoffs are constantly shifting (also much like life).
By investigating this in more detail, we can better learn how to incentivize people to cooperate – whether by setting the allowance we give kids for doing chores, by rewarding teamwork in school and at work or even by how we tax to pay for public benefits such as healthcare and education.
What emerges from our studies is a complex and fascinating picture: the amount of cooperation we see in large groups is in constant flux, and incentives that mean well can inadvertently lead to less rather than more cooperative behavior….(More)”
Budgets for the People
Index: Prizes and Challenges
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on prizes and challenges and was originally published in 2015.
This index highlights recent findings about two key techniques in shifting innovation from institutions to the general public:
- Prize-Induced Contests – using monetary rewards to incentivize individuals and other entities to develop solutions to public problems; and
- Grand Challenges – posing large, audacious goals to the public to spur collaborative, non-governmental efforts to solve them.
You can read more about Governing through Prizes and Challenges here. You can also watch Alph Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, answer the GovLab’s questions about challenge authoring and defining the problem here.
Previous installments of the Index include Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions. Please share any additional statistics and research findings on the intersection of technology in governance with us by emailing shruti at thegovlab.org.
Prize-Induced Contests
- Year the British Government introduced the Longitude Prize, one of the first instances of prizes by government to spur innovation: 1714
- President Obama calls on “all agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges” in his Strategy for American Innovation: September 2009
- The US Office of Management and Budget issues “a policy framework to guide agencies in using prizes to mobilize American ingenuity and advance their respective core missions”: March 2010
- Launch of Challenge.gov, “a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prize competitions”: September 2010
- Number of competitions currently live on Challenge.gov in February 2015: 22 of 399 total
- How many competitions on Challenge.gov are for $1 million or above: 23
- The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act is introduced, which grants “all Federal agencies authority to conduct prize competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions”: 2010
- Value of prizes authorized by COMPETES: prizes up to $50 million
- Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions memorandum issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget to aid agencies to take advantage of authorities in COMPETES: August 2011
- Number of prize competitions run by the Federal government from 2010 to April 2012: 150
- How many Federal agencies have run prize competitions by 2012: 40
- Prior to 1991, the percentage of prize money that recognized prior achievements according to an analysis by McKinsey and Company: 97%
- Since 1991, percentage of new prize money that “has been dedicated to inducement-style prizes that focus on achieving a specific, future goal”: 78%
- Value of the prize sector as estimated by McKinsey in 2009: $1-2 billion
- Growth rate of the total value of new prizes: 18% annually
- Growth rate in charitable giving in the US: 2.5% annually
-
Value of the first Horizon Prize awarded in 2014 by the European Commission to German biopharmaceutical company CureVac GmbH “for progress towards a novel technology to bring life-saving vaccines to people across the planet in safe and affordable ways”: €2 million
- Number of solvers registered on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing company: 355,000+ from nearly 200 countries
-
- Total Challenges Posted: 2,000+ External Challenges
- Total Solution Submissions: 40,000+
- Value of the awards: $5,000 to $1+ million
- Success Rate for premium challenges: 85%
Grand Challenges
- Value of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, sponsored in part by DOE to develop production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: $10 million
- Number of teams around the world who took part in the challenge “to develop a new generation of technologies” for production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: 111 teams
- Time it took for the Air Force Research Laboratory to receive a workable solution on “a problem that had vexed military security forces and civilian police for years” by opening the challenge to the world: 60 days
- Value of the HHS Investing in Innovation initiative to spur innovation in Health IT, launched under the new COMPETES act: $5 million program
- Number of responses received by NASA for its Asteroid Grand Challenge RFI which seeks to identify and address all asteroid threats to the human population: over 400
- The decreased cost of sequencing a single human genome as a result of the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge: $7000 from $100 million
- Amount the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge has contributed to the US economy for every $1 invested by the US federal government: $141 for every $1 invested
- The amount of funding for research available for the “Brain Initiative,” a collaboration between the National Institute of Health, DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which seeks to uncover new prevention and treatment methods for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism and schizophrenia: $100 million
- Total amount offered in cash awards by the Department of Energy’s “SunShot Grand Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate the cost disparity between solar energy and coal by the end of the decade: $10 million
Sources
- ‘And the winner is…’ Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes. McKinsey & Company. July 2009.
- Collins, Francis and Prabhakar, Arati. BRAIN Initiative Challenges Researchers to Unlock Mysteries of Human Mind. The White House. April 02, 2013.
- Facts and Stats. InnoCentive. Last accessed March 2015.
- Horizon Prizes. European Commission. Last accessed March 2015.
- Implementation of Federal Prize Authority: Fiscal Year 2013 Progress Report. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. May, 2014.
- Implementation of Federal Prize Authority: Progress Report. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. March, 2012.
- Kalil, Tom and Dorgelo, Cristin. Identifying Steps Forward in Use of Prizes to Spur Innovation. White House Blog: Office of Science and Technology Policy. April 10, 2012.
- SunShot Prize: Race to 7-Day Solar. Energy.gov. Last accessed March 2015.
- The History. Longitude Prize. Last accessed March 2015.
Apple’s ResearchKit Is a New Way to Do Medical Research
Wired: “….Apple announced a new software framework it hopes will help turn the 700 million iPhones in users’ hands into medical diagnostic tools.
ResearchKit is an open-source framework that lets medical researchers create diagnostic apps that tap into the screens and accelerometers on the iPhone, as well as data from HealthKit apps. The first five apps built with ResearchKit are available today, and they’re built to help diagnose various disorders.
Apple Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams detailed some of the specialized applications available at launch. They include the mPower app, which is built to gauge the effects of Parkinsons’ Disease and was developed in conjunction with the University of Rochester, Xuanwu Hospital at Capital Medical University in Beijing, and Sage Bionetworks.
On stage, Williams demoed tests within the app that could measure hand tremors by using an iPhone touchscreen, vocal trembling using the microphone, and a walking balance test.
Williams said he hopes ResearchKit can help address a few problems with medical research in its current state, such as limited patient participation, infrequent data sampling, and one-way communication from the patient to a medical professional. The ResearchKit apps are designed to be more interactive and allow a patient to control when and with whom to share data.
Along with the mPower demo, Williams mentioned a few more apps that will be available immediately for iOS: a diabetes-diagnostic app from Massachusetts General Hospital; an app to diagnose heart disease from Stanford and the University of Oxford; an Asthma Health app from Mount Sinai Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College; and an app to help victims of breast cancer made by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, UCLA School of Public Health, Penn Medicine, and Sage Bionetworks.
Williams also stressed that customers would be able to control the data shared by each ResearchKit app, and that sensitive data would only be visible by medical researchers….(More)”
Tweets Can Predict Health Insurance Exchange Enrollment
PennMedicine: “An increase in Twitter sentiment (the positivity or negativity of tweets) is associated with an increase in state-level enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance marketplaces — a phenomenon that points to use of the social media platform as a real-time gauge of public opinion and provides a way for marketplaces to quickly identify enrollment changes and emerging issues. Although Twitter has been previously used to measure public perception on a range of health topics, this study, led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and published online in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is the first to look at its relationship with the new national health insurance marketplace enrollment.
The study examined 977,303 ACA and “Obamacare”-related tweets — along with those directed toward the Twitter handle for HealthCare.gov and the 17 state-based marketplace Twitter accounts — in March 2014, then tested a correlation of Twitter sentiment with marketplace enrollment by state. Tweet sentiment was determined using the National Research Council (NRC) sentiment lexicon, which contains more than 54,000 words with corresponding sentiment weights ranging from positive to negative. For example, the word “excellent” has a positive sentiment weight, and is more positive than the word “good,” but the word “awful” is negative. Using this lexicon, researchers found that a .10 increase in the sentiment of tweets was associated with a nine percent increase in health insurance marketplace enrollment at the state level. While a .10 increase may seem small, these numbers indicate a significant correlation between Twitter sentiment and enrollment based on a continuum of sentiment scores that were examined over a million tweets.
“The correlation between Twitter sentiment and the number of eligible individuals who enrolled in a marketplace plan highlights the potential for Twitter to be a real-time monitoring strategy for future enrollment periods,” said first author Charlene A. Wong, MD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and Fellow in Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “This would be especially valuable for quickly identifying emerging issues and making adjustments, instead of having to wait weeks or months for that information to be released in enrollment reports, for example.”…(More)”
Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy
Book by “…Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decision-making and problem-solving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin, and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book explores the use of participation in various arenas, including education, health, land use, and state and federal government. It offers a practical framework for thinking about how to engage citizens effectively, and clear explanations of participation scenarios, tactics, and designs. Finally, the book provides a sensible approach for reshaping our participation infrastructure to meet the needs of public officials and citizens.
The book is filled with illustrative examples of innovative participatory activities, and numerous sources for more information. This important text puts the spotlight on the need for long-term, cross-sector, participation planning, and provides guidance for leaders, citizens, activists, and others who are determined to improve the ways that participation and democracy function. Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy:
- Helps students and practitioners understand the history, theory, and practice of public participation
- Contains a wealth of case studies that explore the application of public participation in different settings
- Covers vital issues such as education, health, land use, and state and federal government
- Has accompanying instructor resources, such as PowerPoint slides, discussion questions, sample assignments, case studies and research from www.participedia.net, and classroom activities. …(more)”
Platform lets patients contribute to their own medical records
Springwise: “Those with complex medical conditions often rely heavily on their own ability to communicate their symptoms in short — and sometimes stressful — healthcare visits. We have recently seen Ginger.io, a smartphone app which uses big data to improve communication between patients and clinicians in between visits, and now OurNotes is a Commonwealth grant funded program that will enable patients to contribute to their own electronic medical records.
The scheme, currently being researched at Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston and four other sites in the US, is part of a countrywide initiative called OpenNotes, which has already enabled five million patients to read their medical records online. Since an initial pilot scheme in 2012, OpenNotes has met with great success — creating improved communication between patients and doctors, and making patients feel more in control of their healthcare and treatments.
The new OurNotes scheme is expected to have particular benefits for medically complex patients who have have multiple chronic health conditions. It will enable patients to make notes on an upcoming visit, listing topics and questions they want to cover. In turn, this presents doctors with an opportunity to prepare and research for tricky or niche questions before meeting their patient…(More)”
Governance in the Information Era
New book edited by Erik W. Johnston:” Policy informatics is addressing governance challenges and their consequences, which span the seeming inability of governments to solve complex problems and the disaffection of people from their governments. Policy informatics seeks approaches that enable our governance systems to address increasingly complex challenges and to meet the rising expectations of people to be full participants in their communities. This book approaches these challenges by applying a combination of the latest American and European approaches in applying complex systems modeling, crowdsourcing, participatory platforms and citizen science to explore complex governance challenges in domains that include education, environment, and health.(More)
City Governments Are Using Yelp to Tell You Where Not to Eat
Michael Luca and Luther Lowe at HBR Blog: “…in recent years consumer-feedback platforms like TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and Chowhound have transformed the restaurant industry (as well as the hospitality industry), becoming important guides for consumers. Yelp has amassed about 67 million reviews in the last decade. So it’s logical to think that these platforms could transform hygiene awareness too — after all, people who contribute to review sites focus on some of the same things inspectors look for.
It turns out that one way user reviews can transform hygiene awareness is by helping health departments better utilize their resources. The deployment of inspectors is usually fairly random, which means time is often wasted on spot checks at clean, rule-abiding restaurants. Social media can help narrow the search for violators.
Within a given city or area, it’s possible to merge the entire history of Yelp reviews and ratings — some of which contain telltale words or phrases such as “dirty” and “made me sick” — with the history of hygiene violations and feed them into an algorithm that can predict the likelihood of finding problems at reviewed restaurants. Thus inspectors can be allocated more efficiently.
In San Francisco, for example, we broke restaurants into the top half and bottom half of hygiene scores. In a recent paper, one of us (Michael Luca, with coauthor Yejin Choi and her graduate students) showed that we could correctly classify more than 80% of restaurants into these two buckets using only Yelp text and ratings. In the next month, we plan to hold a contest on DrivenData to get even better algorithms to help cities out (we are jointly running the contest). Similar algorithms could be applied in any city and in other sorts of prediction tasks.
Another means for transforming hygiene awareness is through the sharing of health-department data with online review sites. The logic is simple: Diners should be informed about violations before they decide on a destination, rather than after.
Over the past two years, we have been working with cities to help them share inspection data with Yelp through an open-data standard that Yelp created in 2012 to encourage officials to put their information in places that are more useful to consumers. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Louisville, Kentucky, customers now see hygiene data alongside Yelp reviews. There’s evidence that users are starting to pay attention to this data — click-through rates are similar to those for other features on Yelp
….
And there’s no reason this type of data sharing should be limited to restaurant-inspection reports. Why not disclose data about dentists’ quality and regulatory compliance via Yelp? Why not use data from TripAdvisor to help spot bedbugs? Why not use Twitter to understand what citizens are concerned about, and what cities can do about it? Uses of social media data for policy, and widespread dissemination of official data through social media, have the potential to become important means of public accountability. (More)
Unleashing the Power of Data to Serve the American People
“Memorandum: Unleashing the Power of Data to Serve the American People
To: The American People
From: Dr. DJ Patil, Deputy U.S. CTO for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist
….While there is a rich history of companies using data to their competitive advantage, the disproportionate beneficiaries of big data and data science have been Internet technologies like social media, search, and e-commerce. Yet transformative uses of data in other spheres are just around the corner. Precision medicine and other forms of smarter health care delivery, individualized education, and the “Internet of Things” (which refers to devices like cars or thermostats communicating with each other using embedded sensors linked through wired and wireless networks) are just a few of the ways in which innovative data science applications will transform our future.
The Obama administration has embraced the use of data to improve the operation of the U.S. government and the interactions that people have with it. On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed Executive Order 13642, which made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a number of Open Data Initiatives aimed at scaling up open data efforts across the government, helping make troves of valuable data — data that taxpayers have already paid for — easily accessible to anyone. In fact, I used data made available by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to improve numerical methods of weather forecasting as part of my doctoral work. So I know firsthand just how valuable this data can be — it helped get me through school!
Given the substantial benefits that responsibly and creatively deployed data can provide to us and our nation, it is essential that we work together to push the frontiers of data science. Given the importance this Administration has placed on data, along with the momentum that has been created, now is a unique time to establish a legacy of data supporting the public good. That is why, after a long time in the private sector, I am returning to the federal government as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist.
Organizations are increasingly realizing that in order to maximize their benefit from data, they require dedicated leadership with the relevant skills. Many corporations, local governments, federal agencies, and others have already created such a role, which is usually called the Chief Data Officer (CDO) or the Chief Data Scientist (CDS). The role of an organization’s CDO or CDS is to help their organization acquire, process, and leverage data in a timely fashion to create efficiencies, iterate on and develop new products, and navigate the competitive landscape.
The Role of the First-Ever U.S. Chief Data Scientist
Similarly, my role as the U.S. CDS will be to responsibly source, process, and leverage data in a timely fashion to enable transparency, provide security, and foster innovation for the benefit of the American public, in order to maximize the nation’s return on its investment in data.
So what specifically am I here to do? As I start, I plan to focus on these four activities:
…(More)”