Evgeniya Lukinova

Metastasised Fraud in Russia's 2008 Presidential Election

DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE OF DIRECT OBSERVATION of elections in ensuring that a vote is free and fair, there are inherent difficulties associated with relying on this method for rendering a judgment as to a vote’s legitimacy. Aside from the impracticality of having any one organisation monitor tens of thousands of polling stations and thousands of backrooms in which votes are counted and tabulated, the observers themselves often have political agendas that leave their conclusions up to debate and interpretation. This was especially true about Russia’s most recent 2008 contest that saw Dmitri Medvedev, as Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked successor, defeat all opponents with an overwhelming 71.25% of the vote. The observer mission of the somewhat misnamed Commonwealth of Independent States concluded that the election was ‘free, open and transparent’ while the Shanghai Cooperation Association (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) deemed the vote ‘in line with international standards’. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) failed to send an observer mission when restrictions placed on it by the Kremlin precluded any meaningful oversight. Meanwhile the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) reported that no major fraud occurred despite its earlier December pre-election critique of the organisation of the 2007 Russian parliamentary vote. On the other side of the coin, Gennady Zyuganov, the perennial standard-bearer of Russia’s Communist Party (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsiya, KPRF), asserted that ‘falsification of the results to achieve the required percentage

The value of sociality

Purpose – This paper aims to study the value of sociality. Recent experimental evidence has brought to light that the assumptions of the Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky do not hold in the proposed substantive domain of “sociality”. In particular, the desire to be a part of the social environment, i.e. the environment where individuals make decisions among their peers, is not contingent on the framing. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans are “social animals” for adaptive reasons. However, entering a social relationship is inherently risky. Therefore, it is extremely important to know how much people value “sociality”, when the social outcomes are valued more than material outcomes and what kinds of adaptations people use. Design/methodology/approach – We develop a new theory and propose the general utility function that features “sociality” component. We test the theory in the laboratory experiments carried out in several countries. Findings – Our results suggest that when stakes are low...

Ukraine 2010: Were Tymoshenko's Cries of Fraud Anything More Than Smoke?

What evidence is there that Ukraine has made a successful transition to a competitive political system embodying free and fair elections? Several indicators of fraud developed and used previously to assess elections elsewhere are applied to official precinct-level returns of Ukraines 2010 presidential contest. Asking if either candidate benefitted from any significant number of suspicious votes or final tallies, the findings are compared to the third round of Ukraines 2004 presidential vote to assess the free and fair nature of Viktor Yanukovichs 2010 victory over Yulia Tymoshenko. The analysis illustrates how elections can be studied to seek objective assessment of a states democratic legitimacy.

Impact of Short Social Training on Prosocial Behaviors: An fMRI Study

Efficient brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) are in need of knowledge about the human brain and how it interacts, plays games, and socializes with other brains. A breakthrough can be achieved by revealing the microfoundations of sociality, an additional component of the utility function reflecting the value of contributing to group success derived from social identity. Building upon our previous behavioral work, we conduct a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments (N = 10 in the Pilot Study and N = 15 in the Main Study) to measure whether and how sociality alters the functional activation of and connectivity between specific systems in the brain. The overarching hypothesis of this study is that sociality, even in a minimal form, serves as a natural mechanism of sustainable cooperation by fostering interaction between brain regions associated with social cognition and those related to value calculation. We use group-based manipulations to induce varying levels of sociality and compare behavior in two social dilemmas: Prisoner’s Dilemma and variations of Ultimatum Game. We find that activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus, a region previously associated with cognitive control and modulation of the valuation system, is correlated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to a greater degree when participants make economic decisions in a game with an acquaintance, high sociality condition, compared to a game with a random individual, low sociality condition. These initial results suggest a specific biological mechanism through which sociality facilitates cooperation, fairness and provision of public goods at the cost of individual gain. Future research should examine neural dynamics in the brain during the computation of utility in the context of strategic games that involve social interaction for a larger sample of subjects.

Sociality as a Natural Mechanism of Public Goods Provision

In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been offered to explain patterns of human behavior in social environments. In particular, these patterns include ‘prosocial’ ones, such as fairness, cooperation, and collective good provision. Psychologists suggest that these prosocial behaviors are driven not by miscalculations, but by salience of social identity, in-group favoritism, emotion, or evolutionary adaptations. This paper imports psychology scholarship into an economic model and results in a sustainable solution to collective action problems without any external enforcement mechanisms. This natural mechanism of public goods provision is created, analyzed, and observed in a controlled laboratory environment using experimental techniques.

Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation

A characteristic feature of the global climate change dilemma is interdependence between the underlying economic development that drives anthropogenic climate change—typically modelled as a common pool resource dilemma1,2—and the subsequent dilemma arising from the need to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, often modelled as a public goods dilemma3,4. In other words, in a carbon-based economy, causal responsibility for climate change is a byproduct of economic development, and is therefore endogenous to it. To capture this endogeneity, we combine these two dilemmas into a ‘compound climate dilemma’ and conduct a series of incentivized experiments in the United States and China to test its implications for cooperation and prosocial behaviour. Here we show that, in a differentiated development condition, even while the advantaged parties increase their prosociality relative to an endogenous but homogeneous baseline condition, the accompanying decrease in cooperative behaviour by the disadvantaged parties more than offsets it. Furthermore, compared with exogenous but identically parameterized control conditions, this endogeneity decreases cooperation in the mitigation dilemma. In light of this interdependence, the basis upon which mitigation obligations should be differentiated becomes an additional dimension of conflict, with implications for domestic politics and international negotiations discussed5,6.In a compound climate change dilemma that allows some to earn a pre-game advantage, advantaged participants act prosocially later to maintain a public good, but the disadvantaged act antisocially, creating conflict that reduces cooperative success.

Time preferences are reliable across time-horizons and verbal vs. experiential tasks

Individual differences in delay-discounting correlate with important real world outcomes, e.g. education, income, drug use, & criminality. As such, delay-discounting has been extensively studied by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists to reveal its behavioral and biological mechanisms in both human and non-human animal models. However, two major methodological differences hinder comparing results across species. Human studies present long time-horizon options verbally, whereas animal studies employ experiential cues and short delays. To bridge these divides, we developed a novel language-free experiential task inspired by animal decision-making studies. We find that subjects’ time-preferences are reliable across both verbal/experiential differences and also second/day differences. When we examined whether discount factors shifted or scaled across the tasks, we found a surprisingly strong effect of temporal context. Taken together, this indicates that subjects have a stable, but context-dependent, time-preference that can be reliably assessed using different methods; thereby, providing a foundation to bridge studies of time-preferences across species.

Cooperation in the social domain: prisoners’ dilemma and social interactions

The standard economic utility function considers defection to be the dominant strategy in the prisoners’ dilemma. Yet, in experiments, cooperative behavior is often observed even in one-shot games. Recent research suggests that framing as well as the substantive domain, i.e. where decision-makers act, matters and impacts outcomes. In this chapter we investigate the role of the “social domain†in the prisoners’ dilemma setting and test it in the laboratory experiments conducted in New Zealand, Russia and the United States. Other than in a standard prisoners’ dilemma, in these experiments, participants can endogenously select themselves into the game by a bidding mechanism and they can be ostracized depending on the votes by other players. We identify significant markers of prosocial behavior in the game and its change with time and experience. Although entering the social circle and playing prisoners’ dilemma does not ensure a bigger profit, participants demand social interactions. We find that in the social domain cooperation rates are significant and grow with the increase in demand for social relationships, but decrease with experience.

Индикаторы Науки: 2017 (Science and Technology Indicators: 2017 :Data Book)

Russian Abstract: Предлагаемый статистический сборник продолжает серию публикаций, посвященных различным аспектам развития науки в Российской Федерации. Открывают сборник таблицы, в которых наряду с основными показателями науки и технологий представлены сведения об основных показателях инновационной деятельности. Приводятся статистические данные о составе организаций, выполняющих исследования и разработки, кадрах и финансировании науки, ее материально-технической базе. В отдельных разделах содержатся сведения об интеллектуальной собственности, коммерциализации и использовании технологий, данные международных сопоставлений. В сборнике использованы сведения Федеральной службы государственной статистики, Министерства образования и науки Российской Федерации, Федеральной службы по интеллектуальной собственности, Межгосударственного статистического комитета СНГ, Организации экономического сотрудничества и развития, Европейской комиссии, Евростата, ЮНЕСКО, Всемирной организации интеллектуальной собственности, а также методологические и аналитические разработки Института статистических исследований и экономики знаний Национального исследовательского университета «Высшая школа экономики». В ряде случаев данные по отдельным показателям уточняют ранее опубликованные. English Abstract: This data book continues the series of publications on various aspects of science and technology development in the Russian Federation. It opens with a set of tables which, along with the main indicators of science and technology, contain the main indicators of innovation. Statistical data on the composition of organisations engaged in research and development, R&D personnel and funding, their material and technical base are provided. Special sections are devoted to intellectual property, commercialisation and use of technology, international comparisons. The publication uses information provided by the Federal State Statistics Service, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Federal Service for Intellectual Property, CIS Interstate Statistical Committee, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Commission, Eurostat, UNESCO, World Intellectual Property Organisation as well as the results of methodological and analytical studies conducted by HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge. In several cases, data on certain indicators improve on previous data.