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1. More information, better knowledge? The effects of information campaigns on aid beneficiaries’ knowledge of aid projects

Author:
Alexander De Juan, Paul Hofman, and Carlo Koos
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Aid beneficiaries know very little about development interventions in their own communities. This lack of transparency and information is likely to reduce beneficiaries’ ability and willingness to become active in local development. It may also dampen intended aid effects on beneficiaries’ political and social attitudes. Can targeted information campaigns strengthen beneficiaries’ understanding of aid projects? We test the effects of two types of interventions: the provision of information only and the combination of information and feedback opportunities. We embed these interventions in a panel survey in rural Mali. Our information treatment is highly customized to specific local aid projects in respondents’ locations and corresponds to beneficiaries’ ex-ante information demands. Nonetheless, two months after the campaign, we find only small treatment effects on respondents’ project-specific knowledge (type, location) and no effects on their procedural knowledge (selection mechanisms). Only people with favourable ex-ante views of the state’s rule adherence and self-identified non-beneficiaries tend to update their views on procedural knowledge. Finally, we find that the combined information and feedback treatment has an effect on respondents’ subjective knowledge, which we interpret as promising mechanisms for engaging and identifying with aid projects.
Topic:
Fragile States, Development Aid, and Information
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. A CERN Model for Studying the Information Environment

Author:
Alicia Wanless and Jacob N. Shapiro
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
After the Second World War, European science was suffering. Scientists were leaving Europe in pursuit of safety and work opportunities, among other reasons. To stem the exodus and unite the community around a vision of science for peace, in 1949, a transatlantic group of scholars proposed the creation of a world-class physics research facility in Europe.1 The grand vision was for this center to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Their white paper laid the foundation for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which today supports fundamental research in physics across an international community of more than 10,000 scientists from twenty-three member states and more than seventy other nations.2 Together, researchers at CERN built cutting-edge instruments to observe dozens of subatomic particles for the first time. And along the way they invented the World Wide Web, which was originally conceived as a tool to empower CERN’s distributed teams. Such large-scale collaboration is once again needed to connect scholars, policymakers, and practitioners internationally and to accelerate research, this time to unlock the mysteries of the information environment. Democracies around the world are grappling with how to safeguard democratic values against online abuse, the proliferation of illiberal and xenophobic narratives, malign interference, and a host of other challenges related to a rapidly evolving information environment. What are the conditions within the information environment that can foster democratic societies and encourage active citizen participation? Sadly, the evidence needed to guide policymaking and social action in this domain is sorely lacking. Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE).3 By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation. Where CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” IRIE will exist to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens.4 While the laws of physics change slowly, the conditions within the information environment are little understood and changing rapidly through the addition of new technology. Additionally, studying the information environment will require analysis of personal and at times sensitive data of internet users, increasing the need for international collaboration. As CERN did by inventing new collaboration tools, IRIE will leverage those same technologies to unlock the collective genius of researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields to strengthen democracy, alongside interested citizens who contribute their own data and expertise. While there are obvious differences between the field of physics and those emerging to study the information environment, aspects of CERN’s development can guide the creation of IRIE, an institution that can uniquely address the growing needs of researchers.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Research, Collaboration, Information, and CERN
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations: Insights from ASPI’s new analytic website

Author:
Jacob Wallis and Albert Zhang
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has launched the Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations website alongside this companion paper. The site provides a visual breakdown of the publically-available data from state-linked information operations on social media. ASPI’s Information Operations and Disinformation team has analysed each of the data sets in Twitter’s Information Operations archive to provide a longitudinal analysis of how each state’s willingness, capability and intent has evolved over time. Our analysis demonstrates that there is a proliferation of state actors willing to deploy information operations targeting their own domestic populations, as well as those of their adversaries. We find that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Venezuela are the most prolific perpetrators. By making these complex data sets available in accessible form ASPI is broadening meaningful engagement on the challenge of state actor information operations and disinformation campaigns for policymakers, civil society and the international research community
Topic:
Cybersecurity, Disinformation, and Information
Political Geography:
Australia and Global Focus

4. Towards efficient information sharing in network markets

Author:
Georgios Petropoulous, Bertin Martens, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Geoffrey Parker
Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
Digital platforms facilitate interactions between consumers and merchants that allow collection of profiling information, which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in market failures both on-platform, among merchants, and off-platform, among competing platforms. This paper develops two product-differentiation models to study private and social incentives to share information within and between platforms. We show that there is scope for ex-ante regulation of mandatory data sharing that improves social welfare better than competing interventions, such as barring entry, break-up, forced divestiture or limiting recommendation steering. These alternate proposals do not make efficient use of information. We argue that the location of data access matters and develop a regulatory framework that introduces a new data right for platform users, the in-situ data right, which is associated with positive welfare gains. By construction, this right enables effective sharing of information together with its context, without reducing the value created by network effects. It also enables regulatory oversight but limits data privacy leakages. We discuss crucial elements of its implementation in order to achieve innovation-friendly and competitive digital markets.
Topic:
Markets, Science and Technology, Data, and Information
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Dynamic Legislative Policy Making under Adverse Selection

Author:
Vincent Anesi
Publication Date:
08-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)
Abstract:
This paper develops a dynamic model of legislative policy making with evolving, privately observed policy preferences. Our goal is to find conditions under which decision rules, which assign feasible policies based on the legislators' preferences, are sustainable in the long run. We show that under some mild conditions, every decision rule that would be implementable with monetary transfers can be approximately sustained in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium of the dynamic model. In this equilibrium, the legislators receive payoffs arbitrarily close to those they would obtain if they could commit ex ante to truthfully apply the decision rule in every period. An application of our result yields a dynamic issue-by-issue median voter theorem in the vein of Baron's (1996) for a spatial framework with incomplete information.
Topic:
Sustainability, Committee Voting, Legislative Bargaining, and Information
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Pillars of Peace

Author:
Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP)
Publication Date:
09-2013
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
Abstract:
The Pillars of Peace is a new conceptual framework for understanding and describing the factors that create peaceful societies. This framework defines the national characteristics which are most closely associated with peace and has been derived from a process of statistical analysis. It stands as one of the few holistic and quantitative based studies to isolate the positive factors which sustain and reinforce peaceful societies. The attitudes, institutions and structures associated with peace are also associated with many other aspects that are considered desirable, such as a strong business environment, gender equality and high levels of human capital; consequently, the Pillars of Peace can be seen as describing the optimal environment for human potential to flourish. Peace can be viewed through the lens of both negative and positive peace. Negative peace, which is the absence of violence or fear of violence, is used as the definition of peace to create the Global Peace Index (GPI), while positive peace can be defined as the attitudes, institutions and structures that, when strengthened, lead to a more peaceful society. The Pillars of Peace provides a framework for assessing the positive peace factors that create peaceful societies. The taxonomy also forms an ideal base for measuring a society’s potential for peace. These positive peace factors can also be used to assess how supportive the underlying environment is towards development, as they are positively associated with developmental outcomes and therefore the fulfillment of human potential. The Pillars of Peace provides the ideal benchmark against which to measure the performance of the broader aspects of social development and a country’s overall resilience when confronted with social upheaval. In constructing the Pillars of Peace over 900 different indices, datasets and attitudinal surveys were analysed in conjunction with current thinking about what drives peace, resilience and conflict. In order to ensure the development of a holistic framework, both a multidisciplinary and ‘systems approach’ was applied to the concept of peace, drawing on a range of recent research.
Topic:
Corruption, Government, Natural Resources, Business, Conflict, Human Capital, Peace, and Information
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. News, Noise, and Fluctuations: An Empirical Exploration

Author:
Olivier Blanchard, Jean-Paul L'Huillier, and Guido Lorenzoni
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD)
Abstract:
We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual changes in fundamentals (news) from those due to temporary errors in agents’ estimates of these fundamentals (noise). We use a simple forward-looking model of consumption to address some methodological issues: structural VARs cannot be used to identify news and noise shocks in the data, but identification is possible via a method of moments or maximum likelihood. Next, we use U.S. data to estimate both our simple model and a richer DSGE model with the same information structure. Our estimates suggest that noise shocks play an important role in short-run consumption fluctuations.
Topic:
News Analysis, Business, and Information
Political Geography:
Global Focus