Hiro Shirado, “Experiments in social inequality and social coordination”

Talk summary: There is burgeoning interest in using online tools to create virtual labs to evaluate human behaviors. The advantages are many, including the ability to recruit large samples quickly and the ease of conducting many replicates of experimental treatment. Here, we perform online social experiments to investigate some of the possible determinants and consequences of social inequality. We also conduct intervention experiments involving a networked coordination game, in which groups of human subject interact with a few autonomous software agents (“bots”).  These experiment results suggest what leads to the emergence and maintenance of inequality and how the inequality can be reduced from a perspective of social coordination.