Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
91
result(s) for
"Christia, Fotini"
Sort by:
Alliance formation in civil wars
\"This book argues that relative power balances, rather than shared identities, explain why combatant groups in the Afghan civil wars constantly aligned with and double-crossed each other, and develops a theory on alliance formation and group fractionalization in multiparty civil wars\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Alliance formation in civil wars
This book explains why Afghan warring groups constantly aligned with and double-crossed each other and develops a theory on behaviors in multiparty civil wars in general. It shows intergroup alliances and intra-group fractionalization are determined by the distribution of relative power among warring groups, rather than ethnicity, race, ideology or religion.
eBook
Empowering Women through Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan
In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs with gender quotas are considered a way to improve women's economic, political, and social status. Using a randomized field experiment across 500 Afghan villages, we examine the effects of a development program that mandates female participation. We find that even in a highly conservative context like Afghanistan, such initiatives improve outcomes specific to female participation in some economic, social, and political activities, including increased mobility and income generation. They, however, produce no change in more entrenched female roles linked to family decision-making or in attitudes toward the general role of women in society.
Journal Article
Mitigating the impact of biased artificial intelligence in emergency decision-making
Background
Prior research has shown that artificial intelligence (AI) systems often encode biases against minority subgroups. However, little work has focused on ways to mitigate the harm discriminatory algorithms can cause in high-stakes settings such as medicine.
Methods
In this study, we experimentally evaluated the impact biased AI recommendations have on emergency decisions, where participants respond to mental health crises by calling for either medical or police assistance. We recruited 438 clinicians and 516 non-experts to participate in our web-based experiment. We evaluated participant decision-making with and without advice from biased and unbiased AI systems. We also varied the style of the AI advice, framing it either as prescriptive recommendations or descriptive flags.
Results
Participant decisions are unbiased without AI advice. However, both clinicians and non-experts are influenced by prescriptive recommendations from a biased algorithm, choosing police help more often in emergencies involving African-American or Muslim men. Crucially, using descriptive flags rather than prescriptive recommendations allows respondents to retain their original, unbiased decision-making.
Conclusions
Our work demonstrates the practical danger of using biased models in health contexts, and suggests that appropriately framing decision support can mitigate the effects of AI bias. These findings must be carefully considered in the many real-world clinical scenarios where inaccurate or biased models may be used to inform important decisions.
Plain language summary
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems that make decisions based on historical data are increasingly common in health care settings. However, many AI models exhibit problematic biases, as data often reflect human prejudices against minority groups. In this study, we used a web-based experiment to evaluate the impact biased models can have when used to inform human decisions. We found that though participants were not inherently biased, they were strongly influenced by advice from a biased model if it was offered prescriptively (i.e., “you should do X”). This adherence led their decisions to be biased against African-American and Muslims individuals. However, framing the same advice descriptively (i.e., without recommending a specific action) allowed participants to remain fair. These results demonstrate that though discriminatory AI can lead to poor outcomes for minority groups, appropriately framing advice can help mitigate its effects.
Adam et al. evaluate the impact of biased AI recommendations on emergency decisions made by respondents to mental health crises. They find that descriptive rather than prescriptive recommendations made by the AI decision support system are more likely to lead to unbiased decision-making.
Journal Article
Following the Money: Muslim versus Muslim in Bosnia's Civil War
A puzzling aspect of the 1992-95 Bosnian war-the intra-Muslim civil war in northwestern Bosnia-can highlight the role of local elites in capturing important interaction effects between micro-level economic incentives and macro-level ethnic cleavages in civil wars.
During civil wars where the broader conflict is cast in macro-ethnic terms, economic incentives can still seriously affect intragroup behavior. Ethnic group unity can be undermined by the presence of charismatic local elites who can guarantee the survival of their local constituents, while
providing access to micro-level economic payoffs.
Journal Article
Context Modularity of Human Altruism
Whereas altruism drives the evolution of human cooperation, ethno-religious diversity has been considered to obstruct it, leading to poverty, corruption, and war. We argue that current research has failed to properly account for the institutional environment and how it affects the role diversity plays. The emergence of thriving, diverse communities throughout human history suggests that diversity does not always lead to cooperation breakdown. We conducted experiments in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina with Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks at a critical historic moment in the city's postwar history. Using a public goods game, we found that the ability to sanction is key to achieving cooperation in ethno-religiously diverse groups, but that sanctions succeed only in integrated institutional environments and fail in segregated ones. Hence, we show experimentally for the first time in a real-life setting that institutions of integration can unleash human altruism and restore cooperation in the presence of diversity.
Journal Article
Electoral Rules and Political Selection: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan
Voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own. This article explores how electoral rules, such as district magnitude, mediate this trade-off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes. We show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple singlemember districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates. Results from a unique field experiment in Afghanistan are consistent with these predictions. Specifically, representatives selected by elections with a single multi-member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences.
Journal Article
Evidence on the nature of sectarian animosity from a geographically representative survey of Iraqi and Iranian Shia pilgrims
Sectarian tensions underlie conflicts across the Middle East, but little is known about their roots and associated beliefs. We conducted a large-scale empirical analysis, drawing on an original, geographically representative survey of over 4,000 devout Shiites across Iran and Iraq. We find that sectarian animosity is linked to economic deprivation, political disillusionment, lack of out-group contact and a sect-based view of domestic politics—paralleling patterns seen in ethno-nationalism elsewhere. In contrast, two alternative accounts are largely unsupported: sectarian animosity is not consistently associated with solidarity with a transnational sect-based community, nor does it seem to stem from disputes over religious doctrine. Nonetheless, this identity’s religious roots manifest in differences from typical ethno-nationalism; practising men are less sectarian, consistent with official doctrine encouraging unity, whereas practising women are more sectarian. These gendered patterns suggest an understudied mechanism: religiously mediated socialization, or the transmission of non-religious norms through religious practice.Using a survey of over 4,000 devout Shia pilgrims across Iran and Iraq, Knox and collaborators evaluate theories about the nature of sectarian animosity and find similarities to ethno-nationalism but not transnational or religious movements.
Journal Article