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
Altruism, trust or incentive studies are very related to what is happening in the field of behavior economy. People in that research field usually use games (popular prisoner's dilemma, dictator game) to test and observe the behaviors of the participants when they encountering different choices. But these kind of games are very limited and artificial and many of the conclusion are very unreliable, for example from the dictator game, one 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