After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

Sami Yousif@samiyousif.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience? These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.

🎓 Great internal seminar this week with our colleague Adrian Chadi, who presented “ #Television and the #LaborMarket: Evidence from Natural Experiments in West and East #Germany.” Insightful discussion on media exposure and labour outcomes. #econtwitter #LaborMarket #applied #econsky

Wrapped up a great week of regulatory outreach! Presented to the @CMAgovUK and @NZComCom on how human-machine market interactions can dampen competition. Thanks to Rajssa Mechelli & David Shaharudin Shahar-Yu for hosting!

Considering outsourcing my ARC Raiders inventory management to Claude Cowork

LLMs and agents are reshaping the landscape of social science research. Our preprint on "LLM Pollution" is featured in @ScienceMagazine's new piece on how Al is upending online studies. www.science.org/content/arti...

AI may upend online studies critical to social science

Sophisticated bots risk contaminating surveys, games, and other approaches designed to shed light on human behavior

science.org

Our dept is hiring an associate professor in microeconomics / competition theory. It is a wonderful department - do get in touch. The job ad is in German but we teach more and more in English, so we‘re flexible. www.hu-berlin.de/en/universit...

Huge shout-out to our PhD students presenting their research at the @unisouthampton.bsky.social ’s Doctoral Research Poster Showcase this week! 🎓 #PhDLife #ResearchExcellence #PhD #DoctoralResearch #Southampton #AcademicShowcase

Our department hosted a great seminar this week by my colleague @tfwerner.com titled "Experimental Evidence That Conversational AI Can Steer Consumer Behavior Without Detection". Eye-opening insights into conversational AI and consumer choices! #AIResearch #BehavioralEconomics #AcademicResearch

📣 New paper! "Delegate Pricing Decisions to an Algorithm? Experimental Evidence" with @normann.bsky.social, Nina Rulié, & @ostypa.bsky.social We study what happens when humans delegate to a collusive algorithm, and AI pricing adoption becomes a strategic choice! arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2510.27636

Delegate Pricing Decisions to an Algorithm? Experimental Evidence

We analyze the delegation of pricing by participants, representing firms, to a collusive, self-learning algorithm in a repeated Bertrand experiment. In the baseline treatment, participants set prices ...

arxiv.org

The fact that fries/chips are just normally sold at Chinese restaurants in Ireland should be studied. But still: spice bag is the best fast food invention since ???

First day in the office! Excited to join the University of Southampton as an Assistant Professor/Lecturer

I like the new robot 'personality' feature of ChatGPT. Although it's probably just a tweak to a system message, it's much more to the point and less wordy. Just weird that, out of the blue, it sometimes ends with things like, 'I am synthesized and not embodied.'

We have our first games ever in Ireland next month. The event will be at the University of Galway as part of CERIS’s Annual Workshop on September 26th. Virtual participation is possible and coauthorship to a meta paper is granted. Register here: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...

With the release of Gemini Live / OpenAls Operator, we started working o perspective piece on how to tackle the growing threat these systems pose to online behavioural research and its validity. We hope this helps move the conversation forward. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.01390

Recognising, Anticipating, and Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research

Online behavioural research faces an emerging threat as participants increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for advice, translation, or task delegation: LLM Pollution. We identify three int...

arxiv.org

Tobias Werner@tfwerner.com · 2y ago

Just used Gemini Live to participate in a beh. experiment without even reading the instructions or speaking the language. LLMs acting as participants on platforms like Prolific could pollute data meant to study humans. With OpenAI’s operator model, this issue is growing. 🎥👇 youtu.be/NujyGZSA7Hg

🚨New paper alert! "Recognising, Anticipating & Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research" Online experiments are being polluted by LLMs. We map the threat and fixes🧵 w/ Raluca Rilla, @hiromu1996.bsky.social, @iyadrahwan.bsky.social & Anne-Marie Nussberger arxiv.org/abs/2508.01390

Recognising, Anticipating, and Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research

Online behavioural research faces an emerging threat as participants increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for advice, translation, or task delegation: LLM Pollution. We identify three int...

arxiv.org

Sitting on the beach, sipping cherry cola (sin azúcar), just won three straight games of Uno against my wife. Life is good.

Last day of my postdoc with some of the best colleagues I could have hoped for.

Mengchen Dong @iyadrahwan.bsky.social and I report data from 3,000+ people (incl. welfare claimants) showing how much accuracy they're willing to sacrifice to get faster AI decisions for social benefits. it's very hard for non-claimants to understand claimants. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heterogeneous preferences and asymmetric insights for AI use among welfare claimants and non-claimants - Nature Communications

Governments use AI to speed up welfare decisions, raising concerns about fairness and accuracy. Here, the authors find that welfare claimants are more averse to AI and their preferences less understoo...

nature.com

Thrilled to share that this September I’ll be joining @sotonecon.bsky.social at @unisouthampton.bsky.social pton.bsky.social as a Lecturer 🎉 I look forward to continuing my research in IO, experimental economics, and human-AI interactions, and to engaging more with the UK econ community.

You gotta love German academia. Receiving a letter (yes, an actual letter, not an email) many, many months after applying just to tell you that you won't be considered for the professorship is always quite the experience.

So happy to see this in print! What began as my Master’s thesis in Bonn 7 years ago is now published in Experimental Economics. With @adrianecon.bsky.social & Fabian Winter doi.org/10.1017/eec....

Does anyone know a paper that specifically looks at the share of online samples (Prolific, MTurk, etc.) relative to lab studies/field studies in recent years? I feel like I saw some stats on that sometime ago on X, but I can’t find it.

Does anyone know a paper that specifically looks at the share of online samples (Prolific, MTurk, etc.) relative to lab studies/field studies in recent years? I feel like I saw some stats on that sometime ago on X, but I can’t find it.

Nur weil es jetzt woanders schlechter läuft, bietet das deutsche akademische System nicht plötzlich Top-Bedingungen. Die strukturellen Probleme sind massiv. Das darf nicht von der Reformnotwendigkeit ablenken. www.zeit.de/2025/23/wiss...

Wissenschaftsstandort Deutschland: Plötzlich begehrt wie Harvard

Trump vertreibt die klügsten Köpfe aus den USA. Und plötzlich ist Deutschland wieder begehrt. Diese Chance sollten wir nutzen – die Forschung hier hat einiges zu bieten.

zeit.de

Happy to be flying back to Berlin next week, but proud to be visiting an institution with the courage to stand its ground and fight back.

The "Berlin Center for AI Research in Economics and Management" (BAIREM) was founded at TU Berlin. With its work, the center strengthens the interface between technology, business and society - and makes an important contribution to responsible digital transformation. Find us: tu.berlin/wm/bairem

We did not want to start the week like this, but here we are. Yet again our chair’s inbox is filled with messages from replicators who have opened “replication” folders only to find names, Social Insurance Numbers, mental-health diagnoses and incomes of study participants. 🧵

A new discussion paper "Suspicion and Communication" (w/ Lisa Bruttel and Friedericke Fromme) is out now! Check it out: ideas.repec.org/p/pot/cepadp... 1/N @cepa-unipotsdam.bsky.social

Being in Philly for the #IIOC2025 reminds me how much my connection to US history comes entirely from American movies. Looking at Independence Hall, all I can picture is Nicolas Cage sprinting across the roof in National Treasure.

Happy to be in Michigan to give a talk on a new paper of ours about delegation to pricing algos! Booked an early flight to Detroit to see the Diego Rivera murals, only to realize it's of course Monday and the Detroit Institute of Arts is closed. Brilliant planning on my part.