Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Philipp Herold: “In today’s world, we cooperate across legal and cultural systems in order to create value. However, this increases volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity as challenges for societies, politics, and business. This has made governance a scarce resource. It thus is inevitable that we understand the means of governance available to us and are able to economize on them. Trends like the increasing role of product labels and a certification industry as well as political movements towards nationalism and conservatism may be seen as reaction to disappointments from excessive cooperation. To avoid failures of cooperation, governance is important – control through e.g. contracts is limited and in governance economics trust is widely advertised without much guidance on its preconditions or limits.

This book draws on the rich insight from research on trust and control, and accommodates the key results for governance considerations in an institutional economics framework. It provides a view on the limits of cooperation from the required degree of governance, which can be achieved through extrinsic motivation or building on intrinsic motivation. Trust Control Economics thus inform a more realistic expectation about the net value added from cooperation by providing a balanced view including the cost of governance. It then becomes clear how complex cooperation is about ‘governance accretion’ where limited trustworthiness is substituted by control and these control instances need to be governed in turn.

Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance is a highly necessary development of institutional economics to reflect progress made in trust research and is a relevant addition for practitioners to better understand the role of trust in the governance of contemporary cooperation-structures. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of economics and business management, institutional economics, and business ethics….(More)”.

Politics and Technology in the Post-Truth Era

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Anna Visvizi and Miltiadis D. Lytras: “Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have directly impacted the way in which politics operates today. Bringing together research on Europe, the US, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, this book examines the relationship between ICT and politics in a global perspective.

Technological innovations such as big data, data mining, sentiment analysis, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, social media and blockchain technology are reshaping the way ICT intersects with politics and in this collection contributors examine these developments, demonstrating their impact on the political landscape. Chapters examine topics such as cyberwarfare and propaganda, post-Soviet space, Snowden, US national security, e-government, GDPR, democratization in Africa and internet freedom.


Providing an overview of new research on the emerging relationship between the promise and potential inherent in ICT and its impact on politics, this edited collection will prove an invaluable text for students, researchers and practitioners working in the fields of Politics, International Relations and Computer Science…..(More)”

How nudge theory is ageing well

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julian Baggini at the Financial Times: “A decade ago, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s book Nudge was on the desk of every serious politician and policy wonk. Its central thesis was alluringly simple: by changing the environment in which we make decisions — the “choice architecture” — people could be encouraged to do things that were good for them and for society without governments compelling them to do anything.

The idea hit the liberal sweet-spot, promising maximum social impact for minimal interference with personal freedom. In 2010, Britain’s government set up its Behavioural Insights Team — popularly known as the “nudge unit” — to put these ideas into practice.

Around the world, others followed. Sunstein is justly proud that 10m poor American children now get free breakfast and lunch during the academic year as a result of just one such intervention making enrolment for free school meals automatic.

Ten years on, Sunstein has produced two new books to win over the unconverted and boost the faith of true believers. One, On Freedom, is a tiny, commuter-friendly pamphlet between hard covers. The other, Trusting Nudges, co-authored with the behavioural economist Lucia A Reisch, is a short, thoughtful, measured and important analysis of what citizens actually think about nudging and why that matters — albeit with the dry, academic furniture of endless tables, footnotes and technical appendices.

Despite the stylistic gulf between them, the two books are best read together as a response to those who would like to give nudges the nudge, claiming that they are covert, manipulative, an insult to human agency and place too much trust in governments and too little on human reason. Not only that, but for all the hype, nudges only work at the margins, delivering relatively minor results without having any major impact on poverty, inequity or inequality.

On Freedom economically and elegantly takes apart the accusation that nudges undermine liberty. Sunstein rightly points out that a nudge is only a nudge by definition if it leaves the nudged able to choose otherwise. For example, the system adopted by several jurisdictions to put people on organ donation registers by default carries with it the right to opt out. Nor are the best nudges covert.

There may not be a sign at the canteen telling you that healthy foods have been put at the front because that’s where you’re more likely to choose them but organisations that adopt this as a policy can and should do so openly. Sunstein’s most important argument is that “we cannot wish choice architecture away”: something has to be on the supermarket shelves that people tend to take more from, something has to be the default for benefit claims. The question is not whether we nudge but how we do so: with forethought or without….(More)”

Trivialization and Public Opinion: Slogans, Substance, and Styles of Thought in the Age of Complexity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Oldrich Bubak and Henry Jacek: “Centering on public discourse and its fundamental lapses, this book takes a unique look at key barriers to social and political advancement in the information age. Public discourse is replete with confident, easy to manage claims, intuitions, and other shortcuts; outstanding of these is trivialization, the trend to distill multifaceted dilemmas to binary choices, neglect the big picture, gloss over alternatives, or filter reality through a lens of convenience—leaving little room for nuance and hence debate.

Far from superficial, such lapses are symptoms of deeper, intrinsically connected shortcomings inviting further attention. Focusing primarily on industrialized democracies, the authors take their readers on a transdisciplinary journey into the world of trivialization, engaging as they do so the intricate issues borne of a modern environment both enabled and constrained by technology. Ultimately, the authors elaborate upon the emerging counterweights to conventional worldviews and the paradigmatic alternatives that promise to help open new avenues for progress….(More)”.

Drones to deliver medicines to 12m people in Ghana

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Munshi in the Financial Times: “The world’s largest drone delivery network, ferrying 150 different medicines and vaccines, as well as blood, to 2,000 clinics in remote parts of Ghana, is set to be announced on Wednesday.

The network represents a big expansion for the Silicon Valley start-up Zipline, which began delivering blood in Rwanda in 2016 using pilotless, preprogrammed aircraft. The move, along with a new agreement in Rwanda signed in December, takes the company beyond simple blood distribution to more complicated vaccine and plasma deliveries.

“What this is going to show is that you can reach every GPS co-ordinate, you can serve everybody,” said Keller Rinaudo, Zipline chief executive. “Every human in that region or country [can be] within a 15-25 minute delivery of any essential medical product — it’s a different way of thinking about universal coverage.”

Zipline will deliver vaccines for yellow fever, polio, diptheria and tetanus which are provided by the World Health Organisation’s Expanded Project on Immunisation. The WHO will also use the company’s system for future mass immunisation programmes in Ghana.

Later this year, Zipline has plans to start operations in the US, in North Carolina, and in south-east Asia. The company said it will be able to serve 100m people within a year, up from the 22m that its projects in Ghana and Rwanda will cover.

In Ghana, Zipline said health workers will receive deliveries via a parachute drop within about 30 minutes of placing their orders by text message….(More)”.

Technology-facilitated Societal Consensus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Timotheus Kampik and Amro Najjar: “The spread of radical opinions, facilitated by homophilic Internet communities (echo chambers), has become a threat to the stability of societies around the globe. The concept of choice architecture–the design of choice information for consumers with the goal of facilitating societally beneficial decisions–provides a promising (although not uncontroversial) general concept to address this problem.

The choice architecture approach is reflected in recent proposals advocating for recommender systems that consider the societal impact of their recommendations and not only strive to optimize revenue streams.

However, the precise nature of the goal state such systems should work towards remains an open question. In this paper, we suggest that this goal state can be defined by considering target opinion spread in a society on different topics of interest as a multivariate normal distribution; i.e., while there is a diversity of opinions, most people have similar opinions on most topics. We explain why this approach is promising, and list a set of crossdisciplinary research challenges that need to be solved to advance the idea….(More)”.

Cyberdiplomacy: Managing Security and Governance Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Shaun Riordan: “The world has been sleep-walking into cyber chaos. The spread of misinformation via social media and the theft of data and intellectual property, along with regular cyberattacks, threaten the fabric of modern societies. All the while, the Internet of Things increases the vulnerability of computer systems, including those controlling critical infrastructure. What can be done to tackle these problems? Does diplomacy offer ways of managing security and containing conflict online?

In this provocative book, Shaun Riordan shows how traditional diplomatic skills and mindsets can be combined with new technologies to bring order and enhance international cooperation. He explains what cyberdiplomacy means for diplomats, foreign services and corporations and explores how it can be applied to issues such as internet governance, cybersecurity, cybercrime and information warfare. Cyberspace, he argues, is too important to leave to technicians. Using the vital tools offered by cyberdiplomacy, we can reduce the escalation and proliferation of cyberconflicts by proactively promoting negotiation and collaboration online….(More)”.

Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen: “The rise of populism in the West and the rise of China in the East have stirred a rethinking of how democratic systems work—and how they fail. The impact of globalism and digital capitalism is forcing worldwide attention to the starker divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” challenging how we think about the social contract.

With fierce clarity and conviction, Renovating Democracy tears down our basic structures and challenges us to conceive of an alternative framework for governance. To truly renovate our global systems, the authors argue for empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system with new mediating institutions that complement representative government. They outline steps to reconfigure the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs, shifting from a “redistribution” after wealth to “pre-distribution” with the aim to enhance the skills and assets of those less well-off. Lastly, they argue for harnessing globalization through “positive nationalism” at home while advocating for global cooperation—specifically with a partnership with China—to create a viable rules-based world order. 

Thought provoking and persuasive, Renovating Democracy serves as a point of departure that deepens and expands the discourse for positive change in governance….(More)”.

The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan R. Copulsky and Garth R. Andrus: “Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions—but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.

The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, surveying more than 16,000 people and conducting interviews with managers at such companies as Walmart, Google, and Salesforce. They introduce the concept of digital maturity—the ability to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new technology—and address the specifics of digital transformation, including cultivating a digital environment, enabling intentional collaboration, and fostering an experimental mindset. Every organization needs to understand its “digital DNA” in order to stop “doing digital” and start “being digital.”

Digital disruption won’t end anytime soon; the average worker will probably experience numerous waves of disruption during the course of a career. The insights offered by The Technology Fallacy will hold true through them all….(More)”.

e-Democracy: Toward a New Model of (Inter)active Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Alfredo M. Ronchi: “This book explores the main elements of e-Democracy, the term normally used to describe the implementation of democratic government processes by electronic means. It provides insights into the main technological and human issues regarding governance, government, participation, inclusion, empowerment, procurement and, last but not least, ethical and privacy issues. Its main aim is to bridge the gap between technological solutions, their successful implementation, and the fruitful utilization of the main set of e-Services totally or partially delivered by governments or non-government organizations.


Today, various parameters actively influence e-Services’ success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflows, infrastructure and technology in general, user habits, literacy, capacity or merely interaction design. This includes having a significant population of citizens who are willing and able to adopt and use online services; as well as developing the managerial and technical capability to implement applications that meet citizens’ needs. This book helps readers understand the mutual dependencies involved; further, a selection of success stories and failures, duly commented on, enables readers to identify the right approach to innovation in governmental e-Services….(More)”