Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: “For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long employed maps, yet have largely abstracted away from exploring the economic determinants and consequences of maps as a subject of independent study. In this essay, we first review and unify recent literature in a variety of different fields that highlights the economic and social consequences of maps, along with an overview of the modern geospatial industry. We then outline our economic framework in which a given map is the result of economic choices around map data and designs, resulting in variations in private and social returns to mapmaking. We highlight five important economic and institutional factors shaping mapmakers’ data and design choices. Our essay ends by proposing that economists pay more attention to the endogeneity of mapmaking and the resulting consequences for economic and social welfare…(More)”.
Blockchain Governance: What We Can Learn From the Economics of Corporate Governance
Paper by Darcy W E Allen and Chris Berg: ” Understanding the considerations and complexities of blockchain governance is urgent. The aim of this paper is to draw on institutional governance theory — including corporate governance — to provide insights into the core considerations in designing blockchain governance mechanisms.
We define blockchain governance are the processes by which stakeholders (those who are affected by and can affect the network) exercise bargaining power over the network. The main considerations include how we define stakeholders in blockchain governance, how the consensus mechanism itself distributes endogenous bargaining power between those stakeholders, the role of exogenous governance mechanisms and institutional frameworks, and the needs for bootstrapping. While we can learn from corporate and internet governance, blockchain governance should be understood as being an institutionally distinct organisational form with distinct governance systems….(More)”.
Tesco Grocery 1.0, a large-scale dataset of grocery purchases in London
Paper by Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia, Rossano Schifanella & Lucia Del Prete: “We present the Tesco Grocery 1.0 dataset: a record of 420 M food items purchased by 1.6 M fidelity card owners who shopped at the 411 Tesco stores in Greater London over the course of the entire year of 2015, aggregated at the level of census areas to preserve anonymity. For each area, we report the number of transactions and nutritional properties of the typical food item bought including the average caloric intake and the composition of nutrients.
The set of global trade international numbers (barcodes) for each food type is also included. To establish data validity we: i) compare food purchase volumes to population from census to assess representativeness, and ii) match nutrient and energy intake to official statistics of food-related illnesses to appraise the extent to which the dataset is ecologically valid. Given its unprecedented scale and geographic granularity, the data can be used to link food purchases to a number of geographically-salient indicators, which enables studies on health outcomes, cultural aspects, and economic factors….(More)”.
Monitoring of the Venezuelan exodus through Facebook’s advertising platform
Paper by Palotti et al: “Venezuela is going through the worst economical, political and social crisis in its modern history. Basic products like food or medicine are scarce and hyperinflation is combined with economic depression. This situation is creating an unprecedented refugee and migrant crisis in the region. Governments and international agencies have not been able to consistently leverage reliable information using traditional methods. Therefore, to organize and deploy any kind of humanitarian response, it is crucial to evaluate new methodologies to measure the number and location of Venezuelan refugees and migrants across Latin America.
In this paper, we propose to use Facebook’s advertising platform as an additional data source for monitoring the ongoing crisis. We estimate and validate national and sub-national numbers of refugees and migrants and break-down their socio-economic profiles to further understand the complexity of the phenomenon. Although limitations exist, we believe that the presented methodology can be of value for real-time assessment of refugee and migrant crises world-wide….(More)”.
Crowdsourcing data to mitigate epidemics
Gabriel M Leung and Kathy Leung at The Lancet: “Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread with unprecedented speed and scale since the first zoonotic event that introduced the causative virus—severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—into humans, probably during November, 2019, according to phylogenetic analyses suggesting the most recent common ancestor of the sequenced genomes emerged between Oct 23, and Dec 16, 2019. The reported cumulative number of confirmed patients worldwide already exceeds 70 000 in almost 30 countries and territories as of Feb 19, 2020, although that the actual number of infections is likely to far outnumber this case count.
During any novel emerging epidemic, let alone one with such magnitude and speed of global spread, a first task is to put together a line list of suspected, probable, and confirmed individuals on the basis of working criteria of the respective case definitions. This line list would allow for quick preliminary assessment of epidemic growth and potential for spread, evidence-based determination of the period of quarantine and isolation, and monitoring of efficiency of detection of potential cases. Frequent refreshing of the line list would further enable real-time updates as more clinical, epidemiological, and virological (including genetic) knowledge become available as the outbreak progresses….
We surveyed different and varied sources of possible line lists for COVID-19 (appendix pp 1–4). A bottleneck remains in carefully collating as much relevant data as possible, sifting through and verifying these data, extracting intelligence to forecast and inform outbreak strategies, and thereafter repeating this process in iterative cycles to monitor and evaluate progress. A possible methodological breakthrough would be to develop and validate algorithms for automated bots to search through cyberspaces of all sorts, by text mining and natural language processing (in languages not limited to English) to expedite these processes.In this era of smartphone and their accompanying applications, the authorities are required to combat not only the epidemic per se, but perhaps an even more sinister outbreak of fake news and false rumours, a so-called infodemic…(More)”.
Wisdom or Madness? Comparing Crowds with Expert Evaluation in Funding the Arts
Paper by Ethan R. Mollick and Ramana Nanda: “In fields as diverse as technology entrepreneurship and the arts, crowds of interested stakeholders are increasingly responsible for deciding which innovations to fund, a privilege that was previously reserved for a few experts, such as venture capitalists and grant‐making bodies. Little is known about the degree to which the crowd differs from experts in judging which ideas to fund, and, indeed, whether the crowd is even rational in making funding decisions. Drawing on a panel of national experts and comprehensive data from the largest crowdfunding site, we examine funding decisions for proposed theater projects, a category where expert and crowd preferences might be expected to differ greatly.
We instead find significant agreement between the funding decisions of crowds and experts. Where crowds and experts disagree, it is far more likely to be a case where the crowd is willing to fund projects that experts may not. Examining the outcomes of these projects, we find no quantitative or qualitative differences between projects funded by the crowd alone, and those that were selected by both the crowd and experts. Our findings suggest that crowdfunding can play an important role in complementing expert decisions, particularly in sectors where the crowds are end users, by allowing projects the option to receive multiple evaluations and thereby lowering the incidence of “false negatives.”…(More)”.
Can Technology Support Democracy?
Essay by Douglas Schuler: “The utopian optimism about democracy and the internet has given way to disillusionment. At the same time, given the complexity of today’s wicked problems, the need for democracy is critical. Unfortunately democracy is under attack around the world, and there are ominous signs of its retreat.
How does democracy fare when digital technology is added to the picture? Weaving technology and democracy together is risky, and technologists who begin any digital project with the conviction that technology can and will solve “problems” of democracy are likely to be disappointed. Technology can be a boon to democracy if it is informed technology.
The goal in writing this essay was to encourage people to help develop and cultivate a rich democratic sphere. Democracy has great potential that it rarely achieves. It is radical, critical, complex, and fragile. It takes different forms in different contexts. These forms are complex and the solutionism promoted by the computer industry and others is not appropriate in the case of democracies. The primary aim of technology in the service of democracy is not merely to make it easier or more convenient but to improve society’s civic intelligence, its ability to address the problems it faces effectively and equitably….(More)”.
Beyond Takedown: Expanding the Toolkit for Responding to Online Hate
Paper by Molly K. Land and Rebecca J. Hamilton: “The current preoccupation with ‘fake news’ has spurred a renewed emphasis in popular discourse on the potential harms of speech. In the world of international law, however, ‘fake news’ is far from new. Propaganda of various sorts is a well-worn tactic of governments, and in its most insidious form, it has played an instrumental role in inciting and enabling some of the worst atrocities of our time. Yet as familiar as propaganda might be in theory, it is raising new issues as it has migrated to the digital realm. Technological developments have largely outpaced existing legal and political tools for responding to the use of mass communications devices to instigate or perpetrate human rights violations.
This chapter evaluates the current practices of social media companies for responding to online hate, arguing that they are inevitably both overbroad and under-inclusive. Using the example of the role played by Facebook in the recent genocide against the minority Muslim Rohingya population in Myanmar, the chapter illustrates the failure of platform hate speech policies to address pervasive and coordinated online speech, often state-sponsored or state-aligned, denigrating a particular group that is used to justify or foster impunity for violence against that group. Addressing this “conditioning speech” requires a more tailored response that includes remedies other than content removal and account suspensions. The chapter concludes by surveying a range of innovative responses to harmful online content that would give social media platforms the flexibly to intervene earlier, but with a much lighter touch….(More)”.
Collaborative е-Rulemaking, Democratic Bots, and the Future of Digital Democracy
Paper by Oren Perez: “… focuses on “deliberative e-rulemaking”: digital consultation processes that seek to facilitate public deliberation over policy or regulatory proposals. The main challenge of е-rulemaking platforms is to support an “intelligent” deliberative process that enables decision makers to identify a wide range of options, weigh the relevant considerations, and develop epistemically responsible solutions. This article discusses and critiques two approaches to this challenge: The Cornell Regulation Room project and model of computationally assisted regulatory participation by Livermore et al. It then proceeds to explore two alternative approaches to e-rulemaking: One is based on the implementation of collaborative, wiki-styled tools. This article discusses the findings of an experiment, which was conducted at Bar-Ilan University and explored various aspects of a wiki-based collaborative е-rulemaking system. The second approach follows a more futuristic approach, focusing on the potential development of autonomous, artificial democratic agents. This article critically discusses this alternative, also in view of the recent debate regarding the idea of “augmented democracy.”…(More)”.
Wisdom of stakeholder crowds in complex social–ecological systems
Paper by Payam Aminpour et al: “Sustainable management of natural resources requires adequate scientific knowledge about complex relationships between human and natural systems. Such understanding is difficult to achieve in many contexts due to data scarcity and knowledge limitations.
We explore the potential of harnessing the collective intelligence of resource stakeholders to overcome this challenge. Using a fisheries example, we show that by aggregating the system knowledge held by stakeholders through graphical mental models, a crowd of diverse resource users produces a system model of social–ecological relationships that is comparable to the best scientific understanding.
We show that the averaged model from a crowd of diverse resource users outperforms those of more homogeneous groups. Importantly, however, we find that the averaged model from a larger sample of individuals can perform worse than one constructed from a smaller sample. However, when averaging mental models within stakeholder-specific subgroups and subsequently aggregating across subgroup models, the effect is reversed. Our work identifies an inexpensive, yet robust way to develop scientific understanding of complex social–ecological systems by leveraging the collective wisdom of non-scientist stakeholders…(More)”.