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Rare but extreme events, such as pandemics, terror attacks, and stock market collapses, pose a risk that could undermine cooperation in societies and groups. We extend the public goods game (PGG) to investigate the relationship between rare but extreme external risks and cooperation in a laboratory experiment. By incorporating risk as an external random variable in the PGG, independent of the participants’ contributions, we preserve the economic equilibrium of non-cooperation in the original game. Furthermore, we examine whether cooperation can be restored by the relatively simple intervention of informing about countermeasures while keeping the actual risk constant. Our experimental results reveal that on average extreme risks indeed decrease contributions by about 20%; however, countermeasure information increases contributions by about 10%. Specifically, in the first interactions, cooperation levels can even reach those observed in the riskless baseline. Our results suggest that countermeasure information could help reinforce social cohesion and resilience in the face of rare but extreme risks.
Twitter and citations
(2023)
Social media, especially Twitter, plays an increasingly important role among researchers in showcasing and promoting their research. Does Twitter affect academic citations? Making use of Twitter activity about columns published on VoxEU, a renowned online platform for economists, we develop an instrumental variable strategy to show that Twitter activity about a research paper has a causal effect on the number of citations that this paper will receive. We find that the existence of at least one tweet, as opposed to none, increases citations by 16-25%. Doubling overall Twitter engagement boosts citations by up to 16%.
We analyze economics PhDs’ collaborations in peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2014 and investigate such collaborations’ quality in relation to each co-author’s research quality, field and specialization. We find that a greater overlap between co-authors’ previous research fields is significantly related to a greater publication success of co-authors’ joint work and this is robust to alternative specifications. Co-authors that engage in a distant collaboration are significantly more likely to have a large research overlap, but this significance is lost when co-authors’ social networks are accounted for. High quality collaboration is more likely to emerge as a result of an interaction between specialists and generalists with overlapping fields of expertise. Regarding interactions across subfields of economics (interdisciplinarity), it is more likely conducted by co- authors who already have interdisciplinary portfolios, than by co-authors who are specialized or starred in different subfields.