Increasingly, crowdfunding is transforming financing for many people worldwide. Yet we know relatively little about how, why, and when funding outcomes are impacted by signaling between funders. We conduct two studies of \(N=500\) and \(N=750\) participants involved in crowdfunding to investigate the effect of “crowd signals,” i.e., certain characteristics deduced from the amounts and timing of contributions, on the decision to fund. In our first study, we find that, under a variety of conditions, contributions of heterogeneous amounts arriving at varying time intervals are significantly more likely to be selected than homogeneous contribution amounts and times. The impact of signaling is strongest among participants who are susceptible to social influence. The effect is remarkably general across different project types, fundraising goals, participant interest in the projects, and participants’ altruistic attitudes. Our second study using less strict controls indicates that the role of crowd signals in decision-making is typically unrecognized by participants. Our results underscore the fundamental nature of social signaling in crowdfunding. They highlight the importance of designing around these crowd signals and inform user strategies both on the project creator and funder side.

Stress, a significant risk factor for chronic disease, manifests as changes in heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure. Non-invasive wearables like smartwatches can continuously track these physiological indicators to predict stress, enabling clinicians to develop and test interventions. However, most current devices are rigid and lack skin conformity, resulting in suboptimal signal quality and adherence during extended use. Furthermore, existing flexible sensors employ either electrocardiogram (ECG) or photoplethysmography (PPG), but not both, which is useful for calculating pulse arrival time (PAT) - known to correlate with stress. Addressing these challenges, we introduce HealthSense, a novel, flexible, and skin-conformable device that integrates ECG, PPG, and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors into a single wearable. We assessed the comfort of wearing HealthSense and the feasibility of stress prediction by conducting a stress-induction study with 11 participants. Participants rated the comfort level of wearing the device on a Likert scale of 1-5, with 80% rating it as a 5 (most comfortable). Using statistical features, heart rate variability (HRV) related features, and PAT from our sensor data, we trained machine learning (ML) models to predict minute-level perceived and physiological stress with F1-scores of 85.5% and 87.7%, respectively. Additionally, using SHAP values, we identified PAT, systolic time, and pulse as the most significant contributors to the predictions. These findings enhance the understanding of physiological manifestations of stress and lays the groundwork for future stress-reduction interventions.

Town hall-type debates are increasingly moving online, irrevocably transforming public discourse. Yet, we know relatively little about crucial social dynamics that determine which arguments are more likely to be successful. This study investigates the impact of one's position in the discussion network created via responses to others' arguments on one's persuasiveness in unfacilitated online debates. We propose a novel framework for measuring the relationship between network position and persuasiveness, using a combination of social network analysis and machine learning. Complementing existing studies investigating the effect of linguistic aspects on persuasiveness, we show that the user's position in a discussion network is associated with their persuasiveness online. Moreover, the recognition of successful persuasion is linked to an increase in dominant network position. Our findings offer important insights into the complex social dynamics of online discourse and provide practical insights for organizations and individuals seeking to understand the interplay between influential positions in a discussion network and persuasive strategies in digital spaces.

Extensive literature argues that crowds possess essential collective intelligence benefits that allow superior decision-making by untrained individuals working in low-information environments. Classic wisdom of crowds theory is based on evidence gathered from studying large groups of diverse and independent decision-makers. Yet, most human decisions are reached in online settings of interconnected like-minded people that challenge these criteria. This observation raises a key question: Are there surprising expressions of collective intelligence online? Here, we explore whether crowds furnish collective intelligence benefits in crowdfunding systems. Crowdfunding has grown and diversified quickly over the past decade, expanding from funding aspirant creative works and supplying pro-social donations to enabling large citizen-funded urban projects and providing commercial interest-based unsecured loans. Using nearly 10 million loan contributions from a market-dominant lending platform, we find evidence for collective intelligence indicators in crowdfunding. Our results, which are based on a two-stage Heckman selection model, indicate that opinion diversity and the speed at which funds are contributed predict who gets funded and who repays, even after accounting for traditional measures of creditworthiness. Moreover, crowds work consistently well in correctly assessing the outcome of high-risk projects. Finally, diversity and speed serve as early warning signals when inferring fundraising based solely on the initial part of the campaign. Our findings broaden the field of crowd-aware system design and inform discussions about the augmentation of traditional financing systems with tech innovations.

Smart speakers are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in society and are now used for satisfying a variety of information needs, from asking about the weather or traffic to accessing the latest breaking news information. Their growing use for news and information consumption presents new questions related to the quality, source diversity, and comprehensiveness of the news-related information they convey. These questions have significant implications for voice assistant technologies acting as algorithmic information intermediaries, but systematic information quality audits have not yet been undertaken. To address this gap, we develop a methodological approach for evaluating information quality in voice assistants for news-related queries. We demonstrate the approach on the Amazon Alexa voice assistant, first characterising Alexa's performance in terms of response relevance, accuracy, and timeliness, and then further elaborating analyses of information quality based on query phrasing, news category, and information provenance. We discuss the implications of our findings for future audits of information quality on voice assistants and for the consumption of news information via such algorithmic intermediaries more broadly.

The growing popularity of online fundraising (aka "crowdfunding") has attracted significant research on the subject. In contrast to previous studies that attempt to predict the success of crowdfunded projects based on specific characteristics of the projects and their creators, we present a more general approach that focuses on crowd dynamics and is robust to the particularities of different crowdfunding platforms. We rely on a multi-method analysis to investigate the correlates, predictive importance, and quasi-causal effects of features that describe crowd dynamics in determining the success of crowdfunded projects. By applying a multi-method analysis to a study of fundraising in three different online markets, we uncover universal crowd dynamics that ultimately decide which projects will succeed. In all analyses and across three markets, we consistently find that funders' behavioural signals (1) are significantly correlated with fundraising success; (2) approximate fundraising outcomes better than the characteristics of projects and their creators such as credit grade, company valuation, and subject domain; and (3) have significant quasi-causal effects on fundraising outcomes while controlling for potentially confounding project variables. By showing that universal features deduced from crowd behaviour are predictive of fundraising success on different crowdfunding platforms, our work provides design-relevant insights about novel types of collective decision-making online. This research inspires thus potential ways to leverage cues from the crowd and catalyses research into crowd-aware system design.

We propose a network-aware multi-agent simulation approach to understanding the interlacing connections between herder-farmer communities in open property regimes. Specifically, we model herder-farmer conflicts in agent-based terms whereby individual decision-making, pastoral mobility, and symbiotic herder-farmer relations result in the emergence of a complex adaptive system in which communal resources are managed in ways that either lead to peaceful coexistence or conflict. From a theoretical perspective, we hope to further understanding of how individual decision-making and coordination produces complex adaptive systems as well as how emergent structures shape individual action. In practice, we anticipate that this study will help shed light on how herder-farmer communities can cooperate and coordinate their activity and mobility patterns to manage common pool resources in sustainable ways that mitigate violent conflict. Broadly, our work aims to contribute new insights towards multi-agent modelling of traditional small-scale societies.

Civil wars are as frequent and debilitating now as ever. More often than not, their resolution consists of the negotiation of a peace accord that involves a number of provisions. Although previous work in political science indicates an underlying interdependence between provision implementation sequences, it is unclear how the structure and dynamics of this interdependence relate to the successful implementation of peace accords. To fill this gap, we systematically study peace process implementation activity from 34 peace accords containing 51 provisions negotiated between 1989 and 2015. We begin by constructing a bipartite network between peace accords and their provisions' implementation and explore statistical properties of the structural underpinnings of peace processes. Then, we examine motifs (i.e., significantly frequent patterns) in provision implementation activity and uncover higher order correlations between provisions. Finally, we identify provision implementation sequences (i.e., meta-groups) that are most strongly associated with successful peace processes. Our empirical findings provide new insights for the implementation of peace accords by revealing temporal sequences of peace process implementation that help build confidence, enhance security, and ultimately prevent negative cascading effects in different stages of the peacebuilding process.