Article history: Received 24 January 2013 Received in revised form 25 September 2013 Accepted 30 October 2013 Available online 7 November 2013

We report on an experiment designed to explore whether allowing individuals to voice their anger prevents costly punishment. For this sake, we use an ultimatum minigame and distinguish two treatments: one in which responders can only accept or reject the offer, and the other in which they can also scold the proposer. By an unannounced successive two-person public goods game, with either the sam...

Purpose – Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments. Design/methodology/approach – The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on full...

We examine the structure and outcomes of user participation in PhishTank, a phishing-report collator. Anyone who wishes may submit URLs of suspected phishing websites, and may vote on the accuracy of other submissions. We find that PhishTank is dominated by the most active users, and that participation follows a power-law distribution, and that this makes it particularly susceptible to manipula...

Openness, accountability, and transparency have attracted researchers’ and practitioners’ interest as open data and citizen engagement initiatives try to capitalize the wisdom of crowds for better governance, policy making, or even service provision. In this context, interoperability between public organizations, citizens, and enterprises seems to remain the center of interest in the public sec...

Fact collections are mostly built using semi-supervised relation extraction techniques and wisdom of the crowds methods, rendering them inherently noisy. In this paper, we propose to validate the resulting facts by leveraging global constraints inherent in large fact collections, observing that correct facts will tend to match their arguments with other facts more often than with incorrect ones...

The Wisdom of Crowds describes the fact that aggregating a group’s estimate regarding unknown values is often a better strategy than selecting even an expert’s opinion. The efficacy of this strategy, however, depends on biases being nonsystematic and everyone being able to make a meaningful assessment. In situations where these conditions do not hold, expertise seems more likely to produce the ...