BEING · Behavioural Economics in Network Games
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-04-01 → 2019-03-31
- EU contribution
- €177,599
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Behavioural Economics in Network Games
What is the problem/issue being addressed? Over the last 50 years behavioural economics has provided new ways to analyse how people make decisions without imposing strong assumption on individual rationality. One area in which behavioural aspects are particularly relevant is the interpretation and aggregation of information prior to any decision. For instance, the underlying assumption that justifies democracy is that decisions are made by well-informed voters. Understanding how voters can be equipped with correct information and use it properly, in particular while interacting and exchanging information in unregulated social networks, is the key issue that was addressed in this project. Why is it important for society? Events during the run-up to the last presidential election in the United States, or to the Brexit referendum have cast doubts on the overall beneficial effects that social media have on society. Understanding how and why some information can easily spread, and what underlying mechanisms on the individual level foster or dampen the spread of information is basis for urgently needed regulation that prevents attacks on European democracies. What are the overall objectives? This project combined insights from behavioural economics and the studies on social and economic networks. The first objective was to set a benchmark of information transmission in networks among fully rational Bayesian agents. The second objective was to understand how people update their beliefs when they do not know the reliability of their source of information. The final objective was to understand how the findings of the first two parts interact, that is, how people use and share information that they find via a social network and whose source is not identifiable.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Three aspects of social interaction shall be combined, namely the diffusion of information in a social network, the formation of social networks, and behavioural (i.e. irrational) aspects in decision making. These three areas are crucially interdependent: 1) unwelcome information and irrational behaviour may lead to a change in a person’s circle of friends and thereby to a change in the social network;2) the network itself and the (potentially irrational) processing of information influences the information diffusion in a society;3) the decisions that have to be made with respect to network formation can be influenced by the disutility of unwelcome information rather than the utility of being correctly informed and thereby lead to irrational behaviour.This shall allow for an integrated approach in the analysis of social dynamics.While the three parts of this project already form an ambitious project that will provide considerable academic impact, they will also lead to interesting follow ups and spin-off research that is highly relevant in the upcoming years, such as the analysis of information diffusion in social networks prior to the European Election in 2019, and to applications outside academia, such as optimising product placement and advertisement in social networks, or the development of measures that prevent vigilantism in social networks.The combination of network formation, innovation diffusion, and behavioural economics is not only a novel approach to these rather young research areas with potential impact in economics, psychology, social sciences, and even computer sciences; it is also a highly relevant topic for modern societies where social media play a crucial role in daily communication and information aggregation. This project will therefore not only add to our understanding of social dynamics and thereby push the academic boundaries, it will also have clear practical implications that allow for a broad exploitation of the research results.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT · MaastrichtCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/747614
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200901171917/http://www.imdokay.com/being/
Data: CORDIS, © European Union