05/04/2023: Daniel Nettle

[GabeNicholson]

Comment below with a well-developed question or comment about the reading for this week's workshop.

If you would really like to ask your question in person, please place two exclamation points before your question to signal that you really want to ask it.

Please post your question by Tuesday of the coming week, at 11:59 PM. We will also ask you all to upvote questions that you think were particularly good. There may be prizes for top question-askers.

[edelahayeUChicago]

Professor, thank you for your work. I'm currently taking a class on Law and Economics that looks at the work by Becker that you cite and builds on it to analyse the ways in which the law can be designed to reduce crime to its optimal level. Have you engaged with the legal literature in this area, and do you have particular thoughts on optimal criminal (and economic) policy as a result? Does the nature of inequality suggest a higher level of optimal crime is permissible?

[WonjeYun]

Dear Professor Nettle Thank you for sharing your research with us. Your research reminded me of the book "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" by Francis Fukuyama, which noted the importance of a trust within the society. It was interesting to see that the link between inequality/deprivation and trust/crime could be replicated as a simulation between individuals.

[lbitsiko]

Hi Professor, Nettle,

Many thanks for sharing your work.
Your model seems to focus on individuals and actions based on resource scarcity. However, we could argue that the root cause of crime and low social trust is connected with concepts such as exploitation of lower socioeconomic classes. Have you considered incorporating systemic factors, into the model to better understand the relationship between inequality and crime?

[Emily-fyeh]

HI Prof. Nettle, Thank you for sharing your work with us. I am curious about how different cultural backgrounds could possibly influence the crime occurrence under the two conditions you proposed in the overall crime reports. What are the implications we can make from this research to the real-world multicultural setting?

[Ry-Wu]

Hi Prof. Nettle, Thank you for sharing your amazing research with us! I'm wondering about the application of this research in real life in different social/cultural contexts. Looking forward to the presentation.

[kuitaiw]

Dear Prof Nettle, Thank you for talking about your work with us. About economic inequality, Gabriel Zucman got Clark 2023 recently. He is an wonderful researcher on inequality. Is there anything we can learn from his research methods?

[LuZhang0128]

Hi Professor Nettle, Thank you for sharing this amazing work. Pardon me if I missed the explanation, but I wonder why you chose to use Gaussian distribution for resource level. Could it be possible that it is a more long-tailed distribution in reality and might affect the results?

[yunshu3112]

Hi Professor Nettle,

Thank you for sharing this! I wonder is agent-based simulation the main methodology in your area? How did the methodologies evolve in the current era of artificial intelligence? Thank you!

[mdvadillo]

Hi Professor Nettle, thank you for sharing your work. I thought this was a very interesting project, and was wondering if the results are robust to activation methods?

[JerryCG]

Dear Daniel,

This is a very interesting silmuation study. I wonder if you can estimate some params in this model like the social trust p to make the simulation closer to reality.

Best, Jerry Cheng

[koichionogi]

Professor Nettle, Thank you so much for sharing your work. In your research, you penalize every step that goes below the depreciation rate(0). In what cases, would this be appropriate, and in what cases this would not be? Optimal action policies with different parameters seem quite interesting. Thank you so much!!

[franciszz992]

Professor Nettle, Thanks for the interesting talk today. The ABM setting is quite innovative and I was surprised to see how well you could tune the model to reflect complex social reality. One question I would further ask is how would you view the complex and hard-to-measure forms of exploitation nowadays that is oftentimes institutional and structural. I wonder how to depicts that with experiment or simulation. Thanks for the sharing again!

[shenyc16]

Dear Prod Nettle, Thanks for presenting this interesting talk. It is quite interesting to think about the relationship between inequality, deprivation, crime, and trust in industrialized societies. The model of cooperation and exploitation that features a desperation threshold constructed in the research is very inspiring, which captures the widely-observed associations between inequality, trust, and crime levels. Thank again for sharing!

[Peihan12]

Hi Professor Nettle, I appreciate you sharing your work with me. I find your model to be intriguing. I was curious if you have any plans to incorporate empirical research to support your model. Additionally, I am interested in learning more about the potential influence of learning processes and networks on the topic you have explored. It appears that these factors may not be fully developed in your current model.

[YutaoHeOVO]

Hi Professor Nettle,

Sorry for the late submission of question and thanks for presenting this interesting talk. It is interesting that the idea of game theory can be incorporated into the research framework. And also how the idea of ABM is introduced into this research background is interesting. And it seems that in this model, people will eventually choose a dominant strategy. And I am wondering if there exists mix-strategy equilibria - instead of returning the optimal strategy, we can see how likely people will choose different options (like cooperate, exploit etc.)? Cuz it seems under this framework, we can take a closer look at how it affects people's behavior under different circumstances.

(And also, can we loose the assumption that people always acting rationally and wisely? And this might induce more interesting result?)

Best, Yutao

[zyang39]

Hi Professor, Thanks for sharing your work! It is interesting to see that a social problem can be explained in a modeling approach and the discussion of micro-foundation is persuasive. However, I do think it is hard to match the model with reality in a quantitative way and there is room for discussion. Thank you!