Related papers: When do Default Nudges Work?
Often, vaccination programs are carried out based on self-interest rather than being mandatory. Owing to the perceptions about risks associated with vaccines and the `herd immunity' effect, it may provide suboptimal vaccination coverage for…
Protecting interventions of many types (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) can be deployed against the spreading of a communicable disease, as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shown. Here we investigate in detail…
We investigate how to efficiently set up work groups to boost group productivity, individual satisfaction, and learning. Therefore, we conduct a natural field experiment in a compulsory undergraduate course and study differences between…
Background: There is uncertainty about the role of different age groups in propagating the SARS-CoV-2 epidemics in different countries. Methods: We used the Koch Institute data on COVID-19 cases in Germany. To minimize the effect of changes…
Influence campaigns in online social networks are often run by organizations, political parties, and nation states to influence large audiences. These campaigns are employed through the use of agents in the network that share persuasive…
Many currently deployed Reinforcement Learning agents work in an environment shared with humans, be them co-workers, users or clients. It is desirable that these agents adjust to people's preferences, learn faster thanks to their help, and…
To end the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers have relied on various public health messages to boost vaccine take-up rates amongst people across wide political spectra, backgrounds, and worldviews. However, much less is understood about…
The pursuit of strategies that minimize the number of individuals needing vaccination to control an outbreak is a well-established area of study in mathematical epidemiology. However, for certain diseases, public policy tends to prioritize…
Hand hygiene is one of the key low-cost measures proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to contain the spread of COVID-19. In a field study conducted during the pandemic in June and July 2020 in Switzerland, we captured the hand…
Randomized trials of infectious disease interventions, such as vaccines, often focus on groups of connected or potentially interacting individuals. When the pathogen of interest is transmissible between study subjects, interference may…
In this work, we contribute the first visual open-source empirical study on human behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to investigate how compliant a general population is to mask-wearing-related public-health policy.…
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…
Background: Despite the consensus that vaccines play an important role in combating the global spread of infectious diseases, vaccine inequity is still rampant with deep-seated mentality of self-priority. This study aims to evaluate the…
Efforts to combat continuing gender inequalities in academia need to be informed by evidence about where differences occur. Citations are relevant as potential evidence in appointment and promotion decisions, but it is unclear whether there…
Occasional social assistance prevents individuals from a range of social ills, particularly unemployment and poverty. It remains unclear, however, how and to what extent continued reliance on social assistance leads to individuals becoming…
Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law…
In this paper, we study the behavior of users on Online Social Networks in the context of Covid-19 vaccines in Italy. We identify two main polarized communities: Provax and Novax. We find that Novax users are more active, more clustered in…
Strong social distancing restrictions have been crucial to controlling the COVID-19 outbreak thus far, and the next question is when and how to relax these restrictions. A sequential timing of relaxing restrictions across groups is explored…
We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…
Understanding the social determinants of preventive behavior is vital for epidemic modelling and effective policy making. Traditional models emphasize imitation or rational trade-offs, but recent evidence highlights the role of social…