Hertie School Research Repository
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Evolutionary Psychology and Artificial Intelligence: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Behaviour
No full textArtificial Intelligence (AI) presents a new landscape for humanity. Both what we can do, and the impact of our ordinary actions is changed by the innovation of digital and intelligent technology. In this chapter we postulate how AI impacts contemporary societies on an individual and collective level. We begin by teasing apart the current actual impact of AI on society from the impact that our cultural narratives surrounding AI has. We then consider the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain a stable society such as heterogeneity, flexibility and cooperation. Taking AI as a prosthetic intelligence, we discuss how—for better and worse—it enhances our connectivity, coordination, equality, distribution of control and our ability to make predictions. We further give examples of how transparency of thoughts and behaviours influence call-out culture and behavioural manipulation with consideration of group dynamics and tribalism. We next consider the efficacy and vulnerability of human trust, including the contexts in which blind trust in information is either adaptive or maladaptive in an age where the cost of information is decreasing. We then discuss trust in AI, and how we can calibrate trust as to avoid over-trust and mistrust adaptively, using transparency as a mechanism. We then explore the barriers for AI increasing accuracy in our perception by focusing on fake news. Finally, we look at the impact of information accuracy, and the battles of individuals against false beliefs. Where available, we use models drawn from scientific simulations to justify and clarify our predictions and analysis
Institutional logics in inter-departmental coordination: Why actors agree on a joint coordination output.
No full textBy investigating two German inter-departmental committees, this article shows that the policy output of these coordination bodies depends on the specific institutional logic evoked throughout the coordination process. While in one of the groups a policy logic prevailed and a joint coordination output was achieved, the other was dominated by a political logic and proved unable to achieve agreement. The article contributes to research on government coordination by showing that actor orientations are crucial for explaining inter-organizational coordination. The results direct attention to the behavioural implications of coordination structures
The role of agencification in achieving value-for-money in public spending
Get PDFAgencification has been pursued globally under the promise of increasing public administration performance. In spite of ample theoretical arguments, the empirical evidence on the causal link between agencification and performance remains scarce and methodologically contested. We contribute to this debate by empirically testing the impacts of agencification across Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom on value‐for‐money, competitiveness, and timeliness during the period 2006–2016. We use unique administrative datasets, enabling objective and granular measurements of reforms and their effects, employing quasi‐experimental methods. Findings suggest heterogeneous effects both across countries and outcomes. On average, value‐for‐money improves by 2.8% or 1.7 billion EUR over a decade, while outputs and processes change only marginally. Recently agencified organizations barely improve their performance, while older agencies achieve substantial improvements. The three countries' heterogeneous administrative contexts play a critical role as mediating factors, with the biggest changes occurring in higher new public management take‐up countries
Salience, Incentives, and Timely Compliance: Evidence from Speeding Tickets
No full textThis paper studies the enforcement of fines. We randomly assign 80,000 speeding tickets to treatments that increase the salience of the payment deadline, late penalties, or both. Stressing the penalties significantly and persistently increases payment rates. Emphasizing only the deadline is not effective. The findings from the RCT are consistent with a survey experiment which documents the treatments' impact on priors about parameters of the compliance problem. Exploiting discontinuous variation in fines, we then document a strong price responsiveness: a 1% increase in the payment obligation induces a 0.23 percentage point decrease in timely compliance. This semi-elasticity suggests that the impact of the salience nudges is equivalent to the effect of a 4-9% reduction in fines
Scrutinising the European Semester in national parliaments: what are the drivers of parliamentary involvement?
No full textHow exactly are national parliaments involved in the European Semester? The stronger coordination of fiscal and economic policies in the European Union (EU) in reaction to the sovereign debt crisis has forced national parliaments to adapt their procedures. This article examines how the European Semester is scrutinised and what factors have driven parliamentary activities in the French National Assembly, the German Bundestag, the Irish Dáil and the Portuguese Assembleia between 2012 and 2017. Particularly noteworthy is that legal provisions for a parliamentary debate on the Stability Programme can be ignored in France, that the German Bundestag is much less active in the European Semester than in EU affairs or in the budget process and that the weakness of Ireland’s parliament in the annual budget procedure affects its role in the European Semester. This article therefore suggests defining minimum standards for parliamentary involvement and strengthening interparliamentary cooperation
Fundamental Rights in European Union Policy-making: The Effects and Advantages of Institutional Diversity
No full textThis article investigates how the European Union’s political process affects the level of rights protection afforded by European Union (EU) law. It does so in two steps, firstly by analysing how institutional politics plays an important role in the evolution of the EU fundamental rights framework and secondly by demonstrating empirically how legislative interaction affects the level of protection provided by three important EU legislative acts. As the article will demonstrate, this interaction tends to result in the overall level of rights protection being increased. Analysing this finding, the article uses institutionalist theory to argue that the EU’s political process carries certain positive effects: the diversity of the legislative process (both within and between institutions) makes the explicit overlooking of rights-based concerns difficult. These findings carry implications for the increasing tendency to channel EU law and policy outside of the ‘ordinary’ legislative process
Internal collaboration as a cornerstone of national digitalisation strategies Empirical findings and recommendations
No full textThe Literature of Derivative Finance
No full textThe financial world is typically seen as a miasma of numbers, which help to make it abstract and opaque. This essay argues that the forms and techniques of the financial world have a strong literary and linguistic dimension. This dimension can be seen in the form of the derivative, whose workings show how traders, central bankers, and analysts rely centrally on the written, spoken, and narrated word and its performative powers