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This is the end report of the task Mass Online Experiments (task 3.4), which was executed as part of the ODISSEI Roadmap project (NWO grant number 184.035.014) between 1 July 2020 and 31 December 2021. The task leaders were Arnout van de Rijt (UU) and Rense Corten (UU). For more information, please contact info@odissei-data.nl.

Buyers in online markets pay higher prices to sellers who promise a highquality product in auctions of used goods, even though they cannot assess quality until after the sale. The principal argument offered in prior work is that reputation systems render sellers’ ‘cheap talk’ credible by allowing buyers to publicly rate sellers’ past honesty and sellers to build a reputation for being honest. We test this argument using both observational data from online auctions on eBay and an internet experiment. Strikingly, in both studies we find that unverifiable promises are trusted by buyers regardless of seller reputation or the presence of a reputation system, and sellers mostly refuse to take advantage. We conclude that the prevailing conception of markets in economic sociology as made possible by opportunism-curtailing institutions is “undersocialized”: Reputation systems may be used to identify more reliable providers of a product, but that they would be needed to prevent otherwise rampant deceit relies on a cynical assumption about human behavior that is empirically untenable. Published online: 15 May 2023

Social networks affect individual behavior as well as social phenomena resulting from behavior ('effects'). Also, when actors can choose with whom to interact, social networks themselves are shaped by behavior ('formation'). This chapter provides a selective overview of rigorous sociology on effects of social networks and their formation. We discuss two examples ('case studies'). One is on effects of exogenously given network characteristics, the other on endogenous network formation. Our examples highlight how micro-macro models account for effects and formation of social networks.

While pandemic containment measures benefit public health, they may jeopardize the social structure of society. We hypothesize that lockdowns and prolonged social distancing measures hinder social support and invite norm violations, eroding social trust. We conducted a pre-registered pre-post study on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 2377; participation rate = 88.8%), measuring social trust reported by the same individuals before and after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that social trust in the Netherlands suddenly dropped from its historically stable level, reaching one of its lowest points on record. The decline was stronger among residents belonging to official high-risk categories, especially if they perceived themselves as likely to become infected. Individuals who more strongly agreed with self-isolation norms or did not perceive a widespread compliance or agreement with such norms also reported a greater loss of trust.

We examine to what extent educational background can be inferred from written text, assuming that educational levels are associated with the style of writing and use of language. Using a large public dataset of almost 60000 dating profiles, containing written text for each profile, we look for a methodology to measure author style. We focus on education and essays fields in each profile from which we try to identify relevant features of written text that reveal the level of education of authors behind texts. Using different types of extracted features, we explore the level of education within three approaches: (i) classifying the level of education to elementary or higher education using lexical features; (ii) using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features; (iii) combining LIWC features and lexical features. For classification, we rely on regularized logistic regression. The joint model which uses both lexical and LIWC features predicts the education level better than other text representation models, but the contribution of LIWC is marginal. Our results may not only be useful in the context of the platform economy and online markets, also more generally to researchers who need to rely on written text as an indicator of educational background.

Many sociologists and economists have maintained that costly sanctions are able to sustain cooperation, but whether carrots or sticks are more successful in this respect is still under dispute (e.g., Balliet, Mulder, and Van Lange 2011; Rand et al. 2009; Sefton, Schupp, and Walker 2007). Furthermore, while many studies investigated the effects of sanctioning institution on cooperation, the long-term effects of sanctions on group solidarity are largely unexplored. In this chapter, we discuss contrasting hypotheses concerning the effects of positive and negative sanctions on cooperation in Public Good Games and solidarity among the group members. Subsequently, we test these hypotheses by means of a laboratory experiment. Our results show that while carrots do increase cooperation, sticks turn out to be more effective. Concerning group solidarity, we do not find differences in group solidarity depending on the type of sanctions available to the group members. However, we find that actors who receive rewards show higher solidarity towards the group.

Research on cooperation and care has largely overlooked the informal care for adults. Informal care is the care for those who experience (mental or physical) health issues. In this contribution we aim to explain the provision of informal care from a transaction cost approach. We do so by investigating the role of coordination problems and trust problems in the supply of informal care from the perspective of the care giver. We also investigate the role of the social embeddedness of the relationship between the care giver and receiver. Using information from 7,166 care givers and non-care givers collected by the Dutch Institute for Social Research and the Central Bureau of Statistics, multivariate analyses are used to test our hypotheses. Results show that less hours of informal care are provided when the complexity of needs is higher. However, unexpectedly, those with more general skills spend less rather than more time of informal care. Our results also suggest that care givers prefer to give informal care to the ones they know and have a close relationship with. Although the findings are mixed, we conclude that informal care provided by the care giver can be viewed upon as a transaction, and give suggestions for further research.

The problem of cooperation and social order is one of the core issues in the social sciences. The key question is how humans, groups, institutions, and countries can avoid or overcome the collective good dilemmas that could lead to a Hobbesian "war of all against all". Using the general set of social dilemmas as a paradigmatic example, rigorous formal analysis can stimulate scientific progress in several ways. The book, consisting of original articles, provides state of the art examples of research along these lines: theoretical, experimental, and field studies on trust and cooperation. The theoretical work covers articles on trust and control, reputation formation, and paradigmatic articles on the benefits and caveats of abstracting reality into models. The experimental articles treat lab based tests of models of trust and reputation, and the effects of the social and institutional embeddedness on behavior in cooperative interactions and possibly emerging inequalities. The field studies test these models in applied settings such as cooperation between organizations, informal care, and different kinds of collaboration networks. The book will be exemplary for rigorous sociology and social sciences more in general in a variety of ways: There is a focus on effects of social conditions, in particular different forms of social and institutional embeddedness, on social outcomes. Theorizing about and testing of effects of social contexts on individual and group outcomes is one of the main aims of sociological research. Modelling efforts include formal explications of micro-macro links that are typically easily overlooked when argumentation is intuitive and impressionistic Extensive attention is paid to unintended effects of intentional behavior, another feature that is a direct consequence of formal theoretical modelling and in-depth data-analyses of the social processes. By combining different empirical methods on the same questions, essentially the book sets forth a mixed-method design across chapters, allowing for a more convincing body of evidence per underlying question Some theoretical contributions re-evaluate what has been learned from the experimental and field results about the strengths and weaknesses of the earlier theoretical propositions, and extend the theory in light of these findings. Integrated systematic and analytical approach to social dilemma problems. Exemplary empirical and theoretical chapters from top-scholars in the field. Mixed-method testing of similar theoretical perspectives on social dilemmas.

Raub and Weesie (1990) proposed a game theoretical model addressingeffects of network embeddedness on conditional cooperation between two actors.This work showed that network embeddedness can facilitate conditional coopera-tion by reducing uncertainty, in line with a number of follow-up contributions andconsistently with results from other modelling approaches. This research focusedmainly on interactions between two parties embedded in a network. In the presentpaper, I extend a closely related model towardsN-person collective good problems,combining conditional cooperation based on direct monitoring via network ties andobservation of group output in an uncertain environment. The focus is on a maxi-mally simple yet empirically relevant case, a core-periphery network in which onlycore-members can directly observe each other’s contributions to a collective effort,whereas peripheral members only observe a noisy signal indicating aggregated con-tributions. I propose the possibility of a‘rational exploitation of the core by the pe-riphery’. Strategy-profiles in which free-riding of peripheral members is toleratedwhile core-members cooperate conditionally, are not only individually rational butalso payoff-superior to profiles with universal conditional cooperation if uncer-tainty is sufficiently high and the number of peripheral members is sufficiently low.

Contains fulltext : 221872.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The sociological literature on social networks overwhelmingly considers the number of core social contacts. Social networks, however, reach far beyond this small number of social ties. We know little about individual variation in the size of such extended social networks. In this study, we move beyond core networks and explain individual variation in the extended social network size among youth. We use survey data of Dutch adolescents (N = 5,921) and use two state-of-the-art measurements to compute extended network sizes: network scale-up methods through Bayesian modeling and the observed number of contacts on Facebook. Among both measurements, we find that extended networks are larger among ethnic majority members, girls, and those who often engage in social foci. This highlights a crucial role for preferences and opportunity in the genesis of extended networks. Additionally, we find that differences between both network sizes (scale-up and Facebook) are smaller for girls and higher educated. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest directions for future research. 32 p.

While social network structures are thought to promote cooperation through reputation effects, as suggested by Raub and Weesie (1990), the option of partner choice may undermine these reputation effects in networks. This article approaches this dilemma by comparing the effects of partner choice and reputation diffusion in isolation as well as in combination in a controlled experimental setting. While we do not find that cooperation rates in the absence of partner choice are higher in the presence of reputation effects, we find that emerging cooperation levels near the end of the game are higher when initial cooperation levels are higher. This is more in line with predictions of models of cooperation that rely on learning heuristics rather than forward-looking rationality (i.e., Corten and Cook, 2009). Moreover, we find that the option of partner choice lowers cooperation rates in the absence of reputation effects. However, we do not find a similar effect in the presence of reputation effects. We position these findings in the larger literature on the conditions for cooperation in dynamic societies.