Evaluation of Human Altruism with DTN based data forwarding

Details

Supervisor:	Sufian Hameed
Duration:	6 months
Type:	Bachelor Thesis
Status:	In progress (Alexander Wolf)

Description

One possible interesting topic as a follow up is about evaluation of human altruism, which is very related to social network you studied in the LENS project. And can also use the Goose as experimental platform. So actually we more of less with all the codes ready and just need to change some of the user interfaces and then we can run the experiment. It is a very interesting topic and can have big impact and most important it will not take much time.

What we are trying to do about testing altruism or trust or incentive etc are very related to what is happening in the field of behaviour economy. People in that research field usually use games (popular prisoners' dilemma, dictator game) to test and observe the behaviours of the participants when they encountering different choices. But these kind of games are very limited and artificial and I think many of the conclusion are very unreliable, for example from the dictator game, you may observe that a lot of participants are willing to share their money with their partners, but we cannot draw the conclusion that people are altruistic from it. The reason is that usually you recruit students to participate in the game (usually happened in academic research), and under your supervision/observation (you are the professor), the students will tend to behave nicely. I think using the DTN data forwarding (whether someone will forward data for others) , we can explore the real altruistic/selfish behavior of the people. If we find out that people are very willing to forward data then it is good for networking conference paper, if we find out that people are not really willing to forward data, we can have a paper to Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization or even to Science. So overall, I believe we are doing very good and important research.

Regarding experiment design, you may want to have a look at these papers. I can also scan a chapter of a book (superfreakonomics) by (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/index.html ) I have to send to you, which introduce the problem very well.

Required Skills

• High motivation and ability to work independently and capability to learn quickly new concepts.
• Basic understanding of computer networking
• Good programming skills

Initial Reading

• So you want to run an experiment, now what? Some Simple Rules of Thumb for Optimal Experimental Design
• What do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World
• On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games