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With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and the vaccination program still rolling out, there continues to be an immediate need for public health officials to better understand the mechanisms behind the deep and perpetual divide over face masks in America. Using a random sample of Americans ( N = 615), following a pre-registered experimental design and analysis plan, we first demonstrated that mask wearers were not innately more cooperative as individuals than non-mask wearers in the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) game when information about their own and the other person’s mask usage was not salient. However, we found strong evidence of in-group favouritism among both mask and non-mask wearers when information about the other partner’s mask usage was known. Non-mask wearers were 23 percentage points less likely to cooperate than mask wearers when facing a mask-wearing partner, and 26 percentage points more likely to cooperate than mask wearers when facing a non-mask-wearing partner. Our analysis suggests social identity effects as the primary reason behind people’s decision whether to wear face masks during the pandemic.

This paper investigates the possibility that a small deceptive act of misrepresenting one’s gender to others reduces cooperation in the Golden Balls game, a variant of a prisoner’s dilemma game. Compared to treatments where either participants’ true genders are revealed to each other in a pair or no information on gender is given, the treatment effects of randomly selecting people to be allowed to misrepresent their gender on defection are positive, sizeable, and statistically significant. Allowing people to misrepresent their gender reduces the average cooperation rate by approximately 10–12 percentage points. While one explanation for the significant treatment effects is that participants who chose to misrepresent their gender in the treatment where they were allowed to do so defect substantially more, the potential of being matched with someone who could be misrepresenting their gender also caused people to defect more than usual as well. On average, individuals who chose to misrepresent their gender are around 32 percentage points more likely to defect than those in the blind and true gender treatments. Further analysis reveals that a large part of the effect is driven by women who misrepresented in same-sex pairs and men who misrepresented in mixed-sex pairs. We conclude that even small short-term opportunities to misrepresent one’s gender can potentially be extremely harmful to later human cooperation.

The popularity of social media has increased users' social visibility. However, users' limited ability to control information spread could compromise privacy. People care about how others perceive them. We examined people's concerns for others' evaluations on their behaviors under different degrees of privacy conditions. Using a variant of the dictator game, we induced dictators to self-select into pro-self or pro-social types and asked recipients to give written evaluations of the dictators. We varied the degree of personal information privacy by making the written content known to the corresponding dictators only, all dictators, or either of them with equal chance. Also, the dictators could avoid receiving the message at a price. We showed that pro-self dictators' willingness to pay to conceal messages decreased when information privacy diminished. Thus, results indicated that image concerns wane in an environment where information privacy is weak. Our results contribute to understanding of the privacy paradox.

Technological developments are things that must be followed by companies to achieve a competitive advantage to improve performance. To achieve and improve performance, companies need active employee engagement by encouraging motivation and fulfilling their job satisfaction. This study aims to analyze the effect of motivation and job satisfaction on performance with employee engagement as a mediating variable. The research sample is Information Technology (IT) companies located in the cities of Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia. Research respondents are system developers who handle system development activities for a project or part of an ongoing project. By using the convenience sampling technique 103 responses were obtained from IT developers. The research model analysis method uses Partial Least Square (PLS) with SMART PLS Ver 3.0 software. Empirical findings prove that motivation has a positive effect on the performance of IT employees, while job satisfaction is independent. Employee engagement does not directly affect employee performance, but the effect of mediation through motivation and job satisfaction can have a significant effect on employee performance. The research findings have managerial implications, in increasing high employee involvement, motivation needs to be encouraged to be more active and innovative, and facilitate the achievement of the desired results. AcknowledgmentThis study was made possible because of the full support of the Region III Education Service Institute (LL-DIKTI III), the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, and the Research Center at Mercu Buana University, Jakarta.

We design an experiment to study the implications of information networks for incentives to acquire costly information, market liquidity, investors' earnings, and asset price characteristics in a financial market. Social communication crowds out information production as a result of an agent's temptation to free ride on the signals purchased by her neighbors. Although information exchange among traders increases trading volume, improves liquidity, and enhances the ability of asset prices to reflect the available information in the market, it fails to improve price informativeness. Net earnings and social welfare are higher with information sharing due to reduced acquisition of costly signals.

A comprehensive review of recent research on niosomes was conducted using a mixed methodology, including searches in databases such as Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science (WoS). Articles were selected based on relevance. The current review examines the historical development of niosomes focusing on the methods of preparations and the contemporary strategies and prospective advancements within the realm of drug delivery systems, highlighting innovative approaches across transdermal, oral, and cellular delivery. This review reported the method of niosomes preparations including a new and novel approach for the preparation of niosomes known as the ball milling method (BM). This technique allows for the precise manipulation of size and shape, leading to improvements in drug release, encapsulation efficiency, and uniformity compared to traditional methods. Niosomes can serve as carriers for delivering various types of drugs, including hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and amphiphilic. This improves the efficiency of encapsulating different drugs, the size of targeted particles, and the desired zeta potential. This is achieved by using a specific charge-inducing agent for drug delivery and targeting specific diseases. These efforts are crucial for overcoming the current limitations and unlocking the full therapeutic potential of modern medicine.

This paper investigates a two-player contest with a multiplicative sabotage effect, showing it can be converted into a standard Tullock contest with a nonlinear, endogenous cost function. We prove the existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy equilibrium. Our findings suggest that sabotage activities can be more pronounced when the productivity difference between players is small, and the more productive player might not necessarily undergo more attacks. Lazear and Rosen ( 1981 ) first-best outcome is attainable for symmetric players if sabotage is sufficiently ineffective or costly. When it is unattainable, optimal pay difference induces positive sabotage only if sabotage is ineffective but relatively inexpensive. Optimal pay difference decreases with effectiveness and increases with the marginal cost of destructive effort, exhibiting a non-monotonic relationship with productive-effort effectiveness. This non-monotonicity contrasts with the monotonicity of the first best pay difference when sabotage is infeasible.

Recently, social science research replicability has received close examination, with discussions revolving around the degree of success in replicating experimental results. We lend insight to the replication discussion by examining the quality of replication studies. We examine how even a seemingly minor protocol deviation in the experimental process (Camerer et al. in Science 351(6280):143–1436, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf0918 ), the removal of common information, can lead to a finding of “non-replication” of the results from the original study (Chen and Chen in Am Econ Rev 101(6):2562–2589, 2011). Our analysis of the data from the original study, its replication, and a series of new experiments shows that, with common information , we obtain the original result in Chen and Chen (2011), whereas without common information , we obtain the null result in Camerer et al. (2016). Together, we use our findings to propose a set of procedure recommendations to increase the quality of replications of laboratory experiments in the social sciences.

Currently, the authentication analysis of edible fats and oils is an emerging issue not only by producers but also by food industries, regulators, and consumers. The adulteration of high quality and expensive edible fats and oils as well as food products containing fats and oils with lower ones are typically motivated by economic reasons. Some analytical methods have been used for authentication analysis of food products, but some of them are complex in sampling preparation and involving sophisticated instruments. Therefore, simple and reliable methods are proposed and developed for these authentication purposes. This review highlighted the comprehensive reports on the application of infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics for authentication of fats and oils. New findings of this review included (1) FTIR spectroscopy combined with chemometrics, which has been used to authenticate fats and oils; (2) due to as fingerprint analytical tools, FTIR spectra have emerged as the most reported analytical techniques applied for authentication analysis of fats and oils; (3) the use of chemometrics as analytical data treatment is a must to extract the information from FTIR spectra to be understandable data. Next, the combination of FTIR spectroscopy with chemometrics must be proposed, developed, and standardized for authentication and assuring the quality of fats and oils.

Ultimate value is rarely hilly realized as people have to maintain a balance between values in their everyday life. Robbins (2015) notes, however, that it may be perfectly exemplified through ritual. In this paper, I want to show that the perfect exemplification of a value that fundamentally matters to a society may otherwise be attained through the incorporation of an overwhelming stranger. Anthropologists have shown that the presence of a potent foreigner incites a sense of categorical disunity that leads to the dialectical counter movement to assimilate them. In this imaginary process of establishing a new unity, I argue, people are not simply attempting to incorporate the pervading stranger but also to encompass them within their hierarchically arranged idea of value. Subsequently, during the moment of assimilation - which can occur through myth, ritual, or other social forms - the community makes their ultimate value socially present. I will try to exemplify my argument by examining key cultural representations of the other among upland-lowland people in North Seram, Eastern Indonesia.