Scholarly Works, Economics
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Browsing Scholarly Works, Economics by Author "Ball, Sheryl B."
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- Cloud-Sourcing: Using an Online Labor Force to Detect Clouds and Cloud Shadows in Landsat ImagesYu, Ling; Ball, Sheryl B.; Blinn, Christine E.; Moeltner, Klaus; Peery, Seth; Thomas, Valerie A.; Wynne, Randolph H. (MDPI, 2015-02-26)We recruit an online labor force through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk platform to identify clouds and cloud shadows in Landsat satellite images. We find that a large group of workers can be mobilized quickly and relatively inexpensively. Our results indicate that workers’ accuracy is insensitive to wage, but deteriorates with the complexity of images and with time-on-task. In most instances, human interpretation of cloud impacted area using a majority rule was more accurate than an automated algorithm (Fmask) commonly used to identify clouds and cloud shadows. However, cirrus-impacted pixels were better identified by Fmask than by human interpreters. Crowd-sourced interpretation of cloud impacted pixels appears to be a promising means by which to augment or potentially validate fully automated algorithms.
- Enumerating rights: more is not always betterBall, Sheryl B.; Dave, Chetan; Dodds, Stefan (Springer, 2023-05-11)Contemporary political and policy debate rhetoric increasingly employs the language of ‘rights’: how they are assigned and what entitlements individuals in a society are due. While the obvious constitution design issues surround how rights enumeration affects the relationship between a government and its citizens, we instead analyze how rights framing impacts how citizens interact with each other. We design and implement a novel experiment to test whether social cooperation depends on the enumeration and positive or negative framing of the right of subjects to take a particular action. We find that when rights are framed positively, there exists an ‘entitlement effect’ that reduces social cooperation levels and crowds-out the tendency of individuals to act pro-socially.
- Focal stimulation of the temporoparietal junction improves rationality in prosocial decision‑makingLi, Flora; Ball, Sheryl B.; Zhang, Xiaomeng; Smith, Alexander Charles (Nature Research, 2020)We tested the hypothesis that modulation of neurocomputational inputs to value-based decisionmaking affects the rationality of economic choices. The brain’s right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) has been functionally associated with both social behavior and with domain-general information processing and attention. To identify the causal function of rTPJ in prosocial decisions, we administered focal high definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) while participants allocated money between themselves and a charity in a modified dictator game. Anodal stimulation led to improved rationality as well as increased charitable giving and egalitarianism, resulting in more consistent and efficient choices and increased sensitivity to the price of giving. These results are consistent with the theory that anodal stimulation of the rTPJ increases the precision of value computations in social decision-making. Our results demonstrate that theories of rTPJ function should account for the multifaceted role of the rTPJ in the representation of social inputs into value-based decisions.
- Gender Differences in Fear and Risk Perception During the COVID-19 PandemicAlsharawy, Abdelaziz Mohammed; Spoon, Ross; Smith, Alexander Charles; Ball, Sheryl B. (Frontiers, 2021-08)The COVID-19 pandemic has led many people to suffer from emotional distress. Previous studies suggest that women process and express affective experiences, such as fear, with a greater intensity compared to men. We administered an online survey to a sample of participants in the United States that measures fear of COVID-19, perceptions about health and financial risks, and preventative measures taken. Despite the empirical fact that men are more likely to experience adverse health consequences from COVID-19, women report greater fear and more negative expectations about health-related consequences of COVID-19 than men. However, women are more optimistic than men regarding the financial consequences of the pandemic. Women also report more negative emotional experiences generally during the pandemic, particularly in situations where other people or the government take actions that make matters worse. Though women report taking more preventative measures than men in response to the pandemic, gender differences in behavior are reduced after controlling for fear. These results shed light on how differences in emotional experiences of the pandemic may inform policy interventions.
- Vaccine Hesitancy and Betrayal AversionAlsharawy, Abdelaziz; Dwibedi, Esha; Aimone, Jason; Ball, Sheryl B. (Springer, 2022-05-17)The determinants of vaccine hesitancy remain complex and context specific. Betrayal aversion occurs when an individual is hesitant to risk being betrayed in an environment involving trust. In this pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that betrayal aversion is not captured by current vaccine hesitancy measures despite representing a significant source of unwillingness to be vaccinated. Our survey instrument was administered to 888 United States residents via Amazon Mechanical Turk in March 2021. We find that over a third of participants have betrayal averse preferences, resulting in an 8–26% decline in vaccine acceptance, depending on the betrayal source. Interestingly, attributing betrayal risk to scientists or government results in the greatest declines in vaccine acceptance. We explore an exogenous message intervention and show that an otherwise effective message acts narrowly and fails to reduce betrayal aversion. Our results demonstrate the importance of betrayal aversion as a preference construct in the decision to vaccinate.