Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo: “We document that between 50% and 70% of changes in the US wage structure over the last four decades are accounted for by the relative wage declines of worker groups specialized in routine tasks in industries experiencing rapid automation. We develop a conceptual framework where tasks across a number of industries are allocated to different types of labor and capital. Automation technologies expand the set of tasks performed by capital, displacing certain worker groups from employment opportunities for which they have comparative advantage. This framework yields a simple equation linking wage changes of a demographic group to the task displacement it experiences.

We report robust evidence in favor of this relationship and show that regression models incorporating task displacement explain much of the changes in education differentials between 1980 and 2016. Our task displacement variable captures the effects of automation technologies (and to a lesser degree offshoring) rather than those of rising market power, markups or deunionization, which themselves do not appear to play a major role in US wage inequality. We also propose a methodology for evaluating the full general equilibrium effects of task displacement (which include induced changes in industry composition and ripple effects as tasks are reallocated across different groups). Our quantitative evaluation based on this methodology explains how major changes in wage inequality can go hand-in-hand with modest productivity gains….(More)”.

Platform as a Rule Maker: Evidence from Airbnb’s Cancellation Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jian Jia, Ginger Zhe Jin & Liad Wagman: “Digital platforms are not only match-making intermediaries but also establish internal rules that govern all users in their ecosystems. To better understand the governing role of platforms, we study two Airbnb pro-guest rules that pertain to guest and host cancellations, using data on Airbnb and VRBO listings in 10 US cities. We demonstrate that such pro-guest rules can drive demand and supply to and from the platform, as a function of the local platform competition between Airbnb and VRBO. Our results suggest that platform competition sometimes dampens a platform wide pro-guest rule and sometimes reinforces it, often with heterogeneous effects on different hosts. This implies that platform competition does not necessarily mitigate a platform’s incentive to treat the two sides asymmetrically, and any public policy in platform competition must consider its implication on all sides….(More)”.

AI and Shared Prosperity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Katya Klinova and Anton Korinek: “Future advances in AI that automate away human labor may have stark implications for labor markets and inequality. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the effects of specific types of AI systems on the labor market, based on how much labor demand they will create versus displace, while taking into account that productivity gains also make society wealthier and thereby contribute to additional labor demand. This analysis enables ethically-minded companies creating or deploying AI systems as well as researchers and policymakers to take into account the effects of their actions on labor markets and inequality, and therefore to steer progress in AI in a direction that advances shared prosperity and an inclusive economic future for all of humanity…(More)”.

Living Labs for Public Sector Innovation: An Integrative Literature Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lars Fuglsang, Anne Vorre Hansen, Ines Mergel, and Maria Taivalsaari Røhnebæk: “The public administration literature and adjacent fields have devoted increasing attention to living labs as environments and structures enabling the co-creation of public sector innovation. However, living labs remain a somewhat elusive concept and phenomenon, and there is a lack of understanding of its versatile nature. To gain a deeper understanding of the multiple dimensions of living labs, this article provides a review assessing how the environments, methods, and outcomes of living labs are addressed in the extant research literature. The findings are drawn together in a model synthesizing how living labs link to public sector innovation, followed by an outline of knowledge gaps and future research avenues….(More)”.

The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Ethics and Technology in Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ben Green: “Recent controversies related to topics such as fake news, privacy, and algorithmic bias have prompted increased public scrutiny of digital technologies and soul-searching among many of the people associated with their development. In response, the tech industry, academia, civil society, and governments have rapidly increased their attention to “ethics” in the design and use of digital technologies (“tech ethics”). Yet almost as quickly as ethics discourse has proliferated across the world of digital technologies, the limitations of these approaches have also become apparent: tech ethics is vague and toothless, is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives, and has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design rather than on the structures and cultures of technology production. As a result of these limitations, many have grown skeptical of tech ethics and its proponents, charging them with “ethics-washing”: promoting ethics research and discourse to defuse criticism and government regulation without committing to ethical behavior. By looking at how ethics has been taken up in both science and business in superficial and depoliticizing ways, I recast tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central fault line is not whether it is desirable to be ethical, but what “ethics” entails and who gets to define it. This framing highlights the significant limits of current approaches to tech ethics and the importance of studying the formulation and real-world effects of tech ethics. In order to identify and develop more rigorous strategies for reforming digital technologies and the social relations that they mediate, I describe a sociotechnical approach to tech ethics, one that reflexively applies many of tech ethics’ own lessons regarding digital technologies to tech ethics itself….(More)”

Implications of the use of artificial intelligence in public governance: A systematic literature review and a research agenda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anneke Zuiderwijk, Yu-Che Chen and Fadi Salem: “To lay the foundation for the special issue that this research article introduces, we present 1) a systematic review of existing literature on the implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public governance and 2) develop a research agenda. First, an assessment based on 26 articles on this topic reveals much exploratory, conceptual, qualitative, and practice-driven research in studies reflecting the increasing complexities of using AI in government – and the resulting implications, opportunities, and risks thereof for public governance. Second, based on both the literature review and the analysis of articles included in this special issue, we propose a research agenda comprising eight process-related recommendations and seven content-related recommendations. Process-wise, future research on the implications of the use of AI for public governance should move towards more public sector-focused, empirical, multidisciplinary, and explanatory research while focusing more on specific forms of AI rather than AI in general. Content-wise, our research agenda calls for the development of solid, multidisciplinary, theoretical foundations for the use of AI for public governance, as well as investigations of effective implementation, engagement, and communication plans for government strategies on AI use in the public sector. Finally, the research agenda calls for research into managing the risks of AI use in the public sector, governance modes possible for AI use in the public sector, performance and impact measurement of AI use in government, and impact evaluation of scaling-up AI usage in the public sector….(More)”.

Did the GDPR increase trust in data collectors? Evidence from observational and experimental data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Paul C. Bauer, Frederic Gerdon, Florian Keusch, Frauke Kreuter & David Vannette: “In the wake of the digital revolution and connected technologies, societies store an ever-increasing amount of data on humans, their preferences, and behavior. These modern technologies create a trust challenge, insofar as individuals have to trust data collectors such as private organizations, government institutions, and researchers that their data is not misused. Privacy regulations should increase trust because they provide laws that increase transparency and allow for punishment in cases in which the trustee violates trust. The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 – a wide-reaching regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy that covers millions of individuals in Europe – provides a unique setting to study the impact of privacy regulation on trust in data collectors. We collected survey panel data in Germany around the implementation date and ran a survey experiment with a GDPR information treatment. Our observational and experimental evidence does not support the hypothesis that the GDPR has positively affected trust. This finding and our discussion of the underlying reasons are relevant for the wider research field of trust, privacy, and big data….(More)”

Innovating Public Service Delivery Through Crowdsourcing: What Role for The Third Sector and Civil Society?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nathalie Colasanti, Chiara Fantauzzi, and Rocco Frondizi: “The purpose of this paper is to study the involvement of the “crowd” in designing innovative public policies, and the possibility for the Third Sector to play a role in this process. To do so, we want to answer the following research question: what is the extent to which crowdsourcing is adopted in financing and delivering public services within New Public Governance arenas? In order to answer it, we employ the following approach. First of all, we will set public innovation into the context of New Public Governance; secondly, we will analyse definitions for crowdsourcing, and thirdly, we will provide an overview and crisis of crowdsourcing examples to demonstrate their significance as novel forms of public service finance and delivery. This approach evidences the potential and the outcomes of applying crowdsourcing in the public sector, and indicates the role of the actors involved: the adoption of a leadership role by the Third Sector could facilitate crowdsourcing processes. The outcome of the application of crowdsourcing in the public sector is a greater involvement of the civil society in its relationship with the State….(More)”.

Big Tech platforms in health research: Re-purposing big data governance in light of the General Data Protection Regulation’s research exemption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Luca Marelli, Giuseppe Testa, and Ine van Hoyweghen: “The emergence of a global industry of digital health platforms operated by Big Tech corporations, and its growing entanglements with academic and pharmaceutical research networks, raise pressing questions on the capacity of current data governance models, regulatory and legal frameworks to safeguard the sustainability of the health research ecosystem. In this article, we direct our attention toward the challenges faced by the European General Data Protection Regulation in regulating the potentially disruptive engagement of Big Tech platforms in health research. The General Data Protection Regulation upholds a rather flexible regime for scientific research through a number of derogations to otherwise stricter data protection requirements, while providing a very broad interpretation of the notion of “scientific research”. Precisely the breadth of these exemptions combined with the ample scope of this notion could provide unintended leeway to the health data processing activities of Big Tech platforms, which have not been immune from carrying out privacy-infringing and socially disruptive practices in the health domain. We thus discuss further finer-grained demarcations to be traced within the broadly construed notion of scientific research, geared to implementing use-based data governance frameworks that distinguish health research activities that should benefit from a facilitated data protection regime from those that should not. We conclude that a “re-purposing” of big data governance approaches in health research is needed if European nations are to promote research activities within a framework of high safeguards for both individual citizens and society….(More)”.

Qualitative Evidence Synthesis: Where Are We at?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kate Flemming and Jane Noyes: “Qualitative evidence syntheses (QES) have increased in prominence and profile over the last decade as a discrete set of methodologies to undertake systematic reviews of primary qualitative research in health and social care and in education. The findings from a qualitative evidence synthesis can enable a richer interpretation of a particular phenomenon, set of circumstances, or experiences than single primary qualitative research studies can achieve. Qualitative evidence synthesis methods were developed in response to an increasing demand from health and social professionals, policy makers, guideline developers and educationalists for review evidence that goes beyond “what works” afforded by systematic reviews of effectiveness. The increasing interest in the synthesis of qualitative research has led to methodological developments documented across a plethora of texts and journal articles. This “State of the Method” paper aims to bring together these methodological developments in one place, contextualizing advances in methods with exemplars to support readers in making choices in approach to a synthesis and aid understanding. The paper clarifies what a “qualitative evidence synthesis” is and explores its role, purpose and development. It details the kind of questions a QES can explore, the processes associated with a QES, including the methods for synthesis. The rational and methods for integrating a QES with systematic reviews of effectiveness are also detailed. Finally approaches reporting and recognition of what a “good” or rigorous QES look like are provided….(More)“.