This study investigates the impact of communication delays and recruitment selection stages on candidates’ perceptions of fairness and recruitment selection outcomes and explores the moderating role of employability. Employing a mixed-method approach across two independent studies involving 264 and 259 mid-level position candidates, two variables – communication timeliness and recruitment stages – are manipulated, while employability is investigated as a moderating variable. Our results indicate that timely communication of rejection, especially during the initial selection stages, significantly enhances candidates’ satisfaction, fairness perceptions, intentions to reapply, and intentions to recommend the organisation to others. Employability moderates the relationship between perceived fairness and recruitment outcomes, strongly influencing the likelihood of peer referrals and reapplication intentions. These findings underscore the importance of strategic communication management in recruitment selection processes to enhance employer branding and the job candidate experience.

How do bribes and lobbying distort judgment? In our experiment, referees are tasked with judging a worker’s performance, and awarding a bonus to workers who score above a certain threshold. We find that bribes and lobbying are both distortionary, but in different ways. Whereas lobbying increases the number of workers receiving a bonus, bribes weaken the relationship between performance and success, with bonuses mostly being awarded to workers who bribe. We discuss implications for anti-corruption interventions.

We revisit the communication primitive in ambient calculi. Previously, such communication was confined to first-order (FO) mode (e.g., merely names or capabilities of ambients can be sent), local mode (e.g., the communication only occurs inside an ambient), or particular cross-hierarchy mode (e.g., parent-child communication). In this work, we explore further higher-order (HO) communication in ambient calculi. Specifically, such a communication mechanism allows sending a whole piece of a program across the borders of ambients and is the only form of communication that can happen exactly between ambients. Since ambients are basically of HO nature (i.e., those being moved may be ambients themselves), in a sense, it appears more natural to have HO communication than FO communication. We stipulate that communications merely occur between equally positioned ambients in a peer-to-peer fashion (e.g., between sibling ambients). Following this line, we drop the local or other forms of communication that violate this criterion. As the workbench, we work on a variant of Fair Ambients extended with HO communication, FAHO. This variant also strengthens the original version in that entirely real-identity interaction is guaranteed. We study the semantics, bisimulation, and expressiveness of FAHO. Particularly, we provide the operational semantics using a labeled transition system. Over the semantics, we define the bisimulation in line with the standard notion of bisimulation for ambients and prove that the bisimulation equivalence (i.e., bisimilarity) is a congruence. In addition, we demonstrate that bisimilarity coincides with observational congruence (i.e., barbed congruence). Moreover, we show that FAHO can encode a minimal Turing-complete HO calculus and thus is computationally complete.

Since the 1950s, the United Nations (UN) has designated days (e.g., World Wetland Day), years (e.g., Year of the Gorilla) and decades (e.g., Decade on Biodiversity) with a commonly stated goal to raise awareness and funding for conservation-oriented initiatives, and these Days, Years and Decades of ‘…’ (hereafter ‘DYDOs’) continue. However, the effectiveness of these initiatives to achieve their stated objectives and to contribute to positive conservation outcomes is unclear. Here we used a binary analysis change model to evaluate the effectiveness of UN conservation-oriented DYDOs observed between 1974 and 2020. We also examined four case studies to understand the different strategies employed to meet specified conservation goals. We found that DYDOs apparently contributed to positive conservation outcomes when they were tied to social media campaigns and/or when they were strategically situated in current events or global discourse. Although the outcomes of DYDOs were varied, those with longer timescales and those that engaged local communities were more likely to be successful. We suggest that DYDO organizers should identify all possible paths of action through the lens of the change model outlined in this paper to strengthen the value and effectiveness of these initiatives in the future. Using this approach could help ensure that resources are used efficiently and effectively, and that initiatives yield positive conservation outcomes that benefit people and nature.

The highly popular belief that rent-control leads to an increase in the amount of affordable housing is in contradiction with ample empirical evidence and congruent theoretical explanations. It can therefore be qualified as a misconception. We present the results of a preregistered on-line experiment in which we study how to dispel this misconception using a refutational approach in two different formats, a video and a text. We find that the refutational video has a significantly higher positive impact on revising the misconception than a refutational text. This effect is driven by individuals who initially agreed with it and depart from it after the treatment. The refutational text, in turn, does not have a significant impact relative to a non-refutational text. Higher cognitive reflective ability is positively associated with revising beliefs in all interventions. Our research shows that visual communication effectively reduces the gap between scientific economic knowledge and the views of citizens.

We report evidence from an experiment where an employer selects one of two workers to perform a task for a fixed compensation. Workers differ in their ability. The employer’s payoff depends on the worker’s ability and on a non-contractible effort that the worker exerts once employed. We find that selected workers exert an effort higher than the minimum enforceable one. When the employers can send a free-text form message to the selected worker, workers with low ability exert significantly higher effort than the workers with high ability. The difference in effort overcompensates the difference in ability.

This study investigates the mechanisms driving the effectiveness of free-form communication in promoting cooperation within a sequential social dilemma game. We hypothesize that the self-constructing nature of free-form communication enhances the sincerity of messages and increases the disutility of dishonoring promises. Our experimental results demonstrate that free-form messages outperform both restricted promises and treatments where subjects select and use previously constructed free-form messages. Interestingly, we find that selected free-form messages and restricted promises achieve similar levels of cooperation. We observe that free-form messages with higher sincerity increase the likelihood of high-price and high-quality choices, thereby promoting cooperation. These messages frequently include promises and honesty, while threats do not promote cooperation. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of the self-constructed nature of free-form messages in promoting cooperation, exceeding the impact of message content compared to restricted communication protocols.

Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (1) asymmetric communication and (2) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote to endogenously establish communication channels even though they would earn higher payoffs if jointly they chose to restrict within-group communication.

We conducted a laboratory experiment to study the effects of communication in a dictator game, while maintaining subjects’ anonymity. In the experiment, the recipient has an opportunity to state a payoff-irrelevant request for his/her share before the dictator dictates his/her offer. We found that the independence hypothesis that voice does not matter is rejected. In particular, if the request is for less than half of the pie, the dictator's offer increases as the recipient's request increases. Additionally, there is no dictator who is other-regarding and, at the same time, does not react to the recipient's request.

The present study explores the value of machine learning techniques in the classification of communication content in experiments. Previously human-coded datasets are used to both train and test algorithm-generated models that relate word counts to categories. For various games, the computer models of the classification are able to match out-of-sample the human classification to a considerable extent. The analysis raises hope that the substantial effort going into such studies can be reduced by using computer algorithms for classification. This would enable a quick and replicable analysis of large-scale datasets at reasonable costs and widen the applicability of such approaches. The paper gives an easily accessible technical introduction into the computational method.