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We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run randomized behavioral…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
Information sharing among organizations has been gaining attention as a method for improving cybersecurity. However, the associated disclosure costs act as deterrents for firms' voluntary cooperation. In this work, we take a game-theoretic…
A recent research trend has emerged to identify developers' emotions, by applying sentiment analysis to the content of communication traces left in collaborative development environments. Trying to overcome the limitations posed by using…
In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision-making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any…
What is the impact of software engineering research on current practices in industry? In this paper, I report on my direct experience as a PhD/post-doc working in software engineering research projects, and then spending the following five…
Agile software development emphasizes flexibility and iterative processes, which may conflict with the more linear, rigid, and time-consuming traditional funding and contracting approaches. This review synthesizes real-life experiences of…
In-person instruction for professional development or other types of workplace training provides a social environment and immediate feedback mechanisms that typically ensure all participants are successful. Online, self-paced instruction…
Gamification is an emerging technique to enhance motivation and performance in traditionally unengaging tasks like software testing. Previous studies have indicated that gamified systems have the potential to improve software testing…
The implementation of a supervision and incentive process for identical workers may lead to wage variance that stems from employer and employee optimization. The harder it is to assess the nature of the labor output, the more important such…
Background. Software Engineering (SE) researchers extensively perform experiments with human subjects. Well-defined samples are required to ensure external validity. Samples are selected \textit{purposely} or by \textit{convenience},…
Background: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…
Context: Using student subjects in empirical studies has been discussed extensively from a methodological perspective in Software Engineering (SE), but there is a lack of similar discussion surrounding ethical aspects of doing so. As…
Context: Software practitioners are a primary provider of information for field studies in software engineering. Research typically recruits practitioners through some kind of sampling. But sampling may not in itself recruit credible…
Background. Starting from the 1960s, practitioners and researchers have looked for ways to empirically investigate new technologies such as inspecting the effectiveness of new methods, tools, or practices. With this purpose, the empirical…
Empirical software engineering is concerned with the design and analysis of empirical studies that include software products, processes, and resources. Optimization is a form of data analytics in support of human decision-making.…
While exploration in single-agent reinforcement learning has been studied extensively in recent years, considerably less work has focused on its counterpart in multi-agent reinforcement learning. To address this issue, this work proposes a…
Aggressive incentive schemes that allow individuals to impose economic punishment on themselves if they fail to meet health goals present a promising approach for encouraging healthier behavior. However, the element of choice inherent in…
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…