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The interplay of technology, family, and identity: Chinese adolescents’ self-presentation on Douyin
No full textIn the context of digitization and globalization, social media platforms, particularly TikTok, have become central spaces for adolescents' self-presentation and social interactions. While TikTok has gained global popularity, its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, serves a similar role but within a distinct regulatory and cultural framework. This study investigated how Chinese adolescents constructed their digital identities on Douyin and examined the role of parents in this process. By integrating Erving Goffman's self-presentation theory and Albert Bandura's social learning theory, the research considered perspectives from adolescents and their parents across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in Shanxi Province, China. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, it captured individuals' psychological experiences and behavioral patterns. Thematic analysis revealed that adolescents' digital behaviors are driven by psychological demands such as belonging, self-identity, and social recognition. The findings demonstrated a complex interplay between adolescents' "front-stage" performances and "back-stage" behaviors on Douyin. Furthermore, parenting styles-whether restrictive or directive-significantly influenced adolescents' behavioral and psychological adaptation. Adolescents developed multifaceted perceptions of their identities through observation, imitation, and content creation, affected by both the global digital landscape and local cultures. Parental mediation either fostered adolescents' psychological security or undermined their autonomy when overly restrictive. Overall, this study uncovers the psychological complexities of adolescents' digital identity construction and emphasizes the interplay among family, culture, and technology. By extending Goffman's and Bandura's theories to the Chinese cultural context, it offers valuable insights into adolescents' psychological development and digital engagement
Equilateral dimension of the planar Banach-Mazur compactum
No full textWe prove that there are arbitrarily large equilateral sets of planar and symmetric convex bodies in the Banach–Mazur distance. The order of the size of these d-equilateral sets asymptotically matches the bounds of the size of maximum-size d-separated sets (determined by Bronstein in 1978), showing that our construction is essentially optima
Continuous-time persuasion by filtering
No full textWe frame dynamic persuasion in a partial observation stochastic control Leader-Follower game with an ergodic criterion. The Receiver controls the dynamics of a multidimensional unobserved state process. Information is provided to the Receiver through a device designed by the Sender that generates the observation process. The commitment of the Sender is enforced. We develop this approach in the case where all dynamics are linear and the preferences of the Receiver are linear-quadratic. We prove a verification theorem for the existence and uniqueness of the solution of the HJB equation satisfied by the Receiver's value function. An extension to the case of persuasion of a mean field of interacting Receivers is also provided. We illustrate this approach in two applications: the provision of information to electricity consumers with a smart meter designed by an electricity producer; the information provided by carbon footprint accounting rules to companies engaged in a best-in-class emissions reduction effort. In the first application, we link the benefits of information provision to the mispricing of electricity production. In the latter, we show that even in the absence of information cost, it might be optimal for the regulator to blur information available to firms to prevent them from coordinating on a higher level of carbon footprint to reduce their cost of reaching a below average emission target
How Zelenskyy's language strategy hit a wall in Trump's White House
No full textVolodymyr Zelenskyy’s clash with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office on 28 February signalled a dramatic shift in America’s support for Ukraine. Ilka Gleibs explains why the language used in the exchange offers important clues about where relations between the two countries may go next
The power of protest: examining mass mobilization’s impact on social change
No full textDo protests matter? Can mass mobilisations truly drive social change? Recent events in Greece have reignited this longstanding debate about protest efficacy. Throughout history, mobilisations have been a defining feature of democratic processes. From civil rights movements in the United States to the Arab Spring and anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe, mass gatherings have played a critical role in shaping policy debates, shifting social attitudes, and driving meaningful change. Yet, the effectiveness of protests remains an open question in academic literature
Academic practitioner collaborations can tackle persistent knowledge inequalities, but they need recognition
No full textWhy do academics engage in practitioner collaborations and how does this shape their research and its wider impact? Armine Ishkanian assesses the impact of a major academic practitioner project and suggests greater recognition is needed for the different types of knowledge and outcomes they produce
A US withdrawal from the IMF would have little effect on the dollar
No full textSince his inauguration in January, Donald Trump has systematically put in place the recommendations of Project 2025. One these recommendations is to withdraw the US from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Robert Wade writes that while the US leaving the IMF would be a shock to the international monetary system, it might mean little change for how the IMF uses the dollar and for the “dollar system” more generally
Hierarchies of expertise and the early days of research at the World Bank
No full textWhile there has been no shortage of recent work that has tried to understand the power of economists and prevalence of economic mode of thinking, far less has been said about the instances where economists were unable to exert influence. While power struggles between economists have most often been the subject of investigation within the academe, the struggle for influence for different types of economic expertise within policy institutions is understudied. This paper examines the different understandings of debt repayment prospects that developed in the World Bank during its first twenty years of operation. The organisation’s internal structure reflected conflicts between different departments that left economists in the research department in the weaker position. Economists’ epistemic authority is intimately related to the organisation of expertise and the alignment to management’s objectives, as well as formality of economists’ tools
Faster dynamic auctions via polymatroid sum
No full textWe consider dynamic auctions for finding Walrasian equilibria in markets with indivisible items and strong gross substitutes valuation functions. Each price adjustment step in these auction algorithms requires finding an inclusion-wise minimal maximally overdemanded set or an inclusion-wise minimal maximally underdemanded set at the current prices. Both can be formulated as a submodular function minimization problem. We observe that minimizing this submodular function corresponds to a polymatroid sum problem, and using this viewpoint, we give a fast and simple push-relabel algorithm for finding the required sets. This improves on the previously best running time of Murota, Shioura and Yang (ISAAC 2013). Our algorithm is an adaptation of the push-relabel framework by Frank and Miklós (JJIAM 2012) to the particular setting. We obtain a further improvement for the special case of unit-supplies. We further show the following monotonicity properties of Walrasian prices: both the minimal and maximal Walrasian prices can only increase if supply of goods decreases, or if the demand of buyers increases. This is derived from a fine-grained analysis of market prices. We call packing prices a price vector such that there is a feasible allocation where each buyer obtains a utility maximizing set. Conversely, by covering prices we mean a price vector such that there exists a collection of utility maximizing sets of the buyers that include all available goods. We show that for strong gross substitutes valuations, the component-wise minimal packing prices coincide with the minimal Walrasian prices and the component-wise maximal covering prices coincide with the maximal Walrasian prices. These properties in turn lead to the price monotonicity results
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson: the identification of historically contingent causal effects
No full textThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”. This paper reviews the contributions of these three scholars to our understanding of the institutional causes of historical and contemporary economic development. We place their work in the context of the intellectual history of the fields of economics and economic history: these authors pioneered the quantitative analysis of historical natural experiments to identify the causal effects of political institutions. We then discuss a less widely discussed contribution of their work: the identification of historically contingent causal effects. Historical contingency, we argue, is at the heart of their conceptual and empirical insights. These insights clarify transformative processes in historical development, including: (i) European colonialism; (ii) the Atlantic Trade; and (iii) the French Revolution. More generally, they have implications for how we think about the path-dependence of political institutions and economic development: history has a long shadow, but that shadow shifts over time