Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

Experimental Economics became an autonomous field of research after WWII in concomitance with the increasing interest in Microeconomic theory. The VonNeumann-Morgenstern’s Expected Utility Theory gave a lot of opportunity to test behaviour trough lotteries (Allais Paradox...). In 1952 the Conference of Santa Monica grounded Experimental Economics on more theoretical basis and gave to the discipline an autonomous methodological structure.

实验经济学（Experimental Economics）研究思路及成果应用简述

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration; Keith Sawyer; Basic Books, NY, 2007; 274 pp., $26.95. If you're involved in a business that depends on sustained innovation (and which doesn't?)-especially if you're a manager who can influence decisions and resources-then add this to your reading list. Keith Sawyer's writing is direct, clear, even friendly, and the text is unencumbered by ponderous footnotes and thick quotations. An associate professor of psychology at Washington University, St. Louis, Sawyer's personal hobbies of jazz and improv theater appear again and again to support his thesis that innovation is a product of groups, and that the solitary genius is a myth. But the scope of the book is more than that: it covers the important and current thinking about fostering innovation in the Internet-enabled age. By my own reading and experience in a research-driven Fortune 500 corporation, the innovation literature is converging on a number of "best practices." Sawyer captures them well, and with his well-chosen supporting anecdotes these are reason enough to read the book and get to work applying these lessons in your organization: * Poorly structured, lazy brainstorming is practiced so frequently and is so wasteful, we can't have enough books that reveal its flaws and how to improve upon it. Sawyer's treatment is excellent. * Sustained innovation depends on having many irons in the fire, with the corollary that failure will be frequent and must be supported. * Myths about lone geniuses need bursting. Even those who work alone stand on the shoulders of giants, and implementation always needs teamwork and has its own continuing need for creative problem solving. The risk of propagating the solitary genius concept (to the exclusion of other possibilities) is that organizations will fail to support "messy" teams. * Innovation happens at the "edge of chaos"; either too much or too little structure is destructive. * Clusters are important. It may seem risky to have many firms in one location competing for a common pool of talent, but history shows that a crossfertilizing, dynamic environment is more innovative and sustainable. * The Internet and related communications standards are flattening the world at an unprecedented pace; the Web empowers enormous networks of individual innovators. Standing still is not an option. Group Genius also benefits from: * Annotated Notes: Sawyer has made a wise choice to keep the prose simple and fast-moving, but as a result, major ideas sometimes jump off the page as bald assertions (for example, ". . . the most effective . . . groups are self-managing. . . . without being directed by a leader."). The annotated notes at the end of the book provide good counterweight and credibility to the breezy style. * Frequent Checklists: The book is sprinkled with bulleted lists of do's and don'ts, which stitch the storytelling narrative together into practical advice. …

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Although interruptions are daily occurring events for most working people, little research has been done on the impacts of interruptions on workers and their performance. This study examines the e Vects of interruptions on task performance and its regulation, as well as on workers’ psychological and psychophysiological state. Two parallel experiments were carried out in the Netherlands and in Russia, using a common conceptual framework and overlapping designs. Employees with relevant work experience carried out realistic text editing tasks in a simulated o Yce environment, while the frequency and complexity of interruptions were experimentally manipulated. It was hypothesized that interruptions: (i) would cause a deterioration of performance; (ii) evoke strategies to partially compensate for this deterioration; (iii) aVect subjects’ emotions and well-being negatively; and (iv) raise the level of eVort and activation. It was also hypothesized that greater frequency and complexity of interruptions would enhance the expected e Vects. The hypotheses are only partially cone rmed. The results show that, contrary to what was expected, interruptions cause people to perform the main task faster while maintaining the level of quality. Participants develop strategies enabling them to deal e Vectively with the interruptions, while actually over-compensating the potential performance decline. Interruptions do have a negative impact on emotion and well-being, and lead to an increase of e Vort expenditure, although not to an increase in activation. Thus the improved performance is achieved at the expense of higher psychological costs. Greater complexity evoked more favourable responses among the Dutch participants and more unfavourable ones among the Russian participants. These diVerences are interpreted in terms of the participants’ professional background. The research demonstrates that the e Vects of interruptions reach beyond the execution of additional tasks and the change of work strategies. Interruptions appear to have an after-e Vect, ine uencing the workers’ subsequent readiness to perform. Detailed analysis of the activity in the interruption interval, focusing on

Temporal factors in mental work: effects on interrupted activities

The state of immersive technology research: A literature analysis

Few open source software (OSS) projects have been great success stories. One reason for this is project stagnation after developers quit their projects. This fact has motivated researchers to examine the factors that influence developers' intention to continue their participation. One factor is trust among developers. The effects of trust on developers' intention to remain with their projects have been studied. However, little is known about its conceptual counterpart, distrust. This dearth of knowledge motivates our research. First, we studied what OSS project features affect trust and distrust among developers. Second, we examined how trust and distrust influence developers' intention to continue participating. We tested our hypotheses with 451 data points from an online survey. Our findings indicate that cooperative norms and effective communication engender trust, whereas an accreditation mechanism eliminates distrust. Additionally, trust positively influences their intention to continue participating...

Trust and distrust in open source software development

While the literature supports the use of share market simulation as an educational tool we analyse the impact of a share market simulation on student self-efficacy and understanding.  We find evidence of a statistically significant increase in self-efficacy through the use of the educational simulation.  We also find that while self-efficacy at the start of the simulation is positively correlated with the level of self-efficacy at the end, the final level of understanding attained is positively related to both self-efficacy and the level of understanding that existed at the beginning of the simulation.

/pdf/impact-of-computer-based-share-market-simulations-on-38hcdjknfm.pdf

Impact Of Computer Based Share Market Simulations On Learning: A Link Between Self-Efficacy And Understanding

Anti-malware software must be frequently updated in order to protect the system and the user from attack. Makers of this software must choose between interrupting the user to update immediately or ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0144929X.2020.1734087

Understanding negotiated anti-malware interruption effects on user decision quality in endpoint security

Agency is the human capability to exert influence over one’s actions and environment, such as through forethought, self-regulation and self-reflection. We focus on six prominent agency constructs, ...

It’s not just action but also about reflection: Taking stock of agency research to develop a future research agenda

An electronic share market trading game was introduced to a large first year undergraduate finance course to allow students to experience share market trading. The response from students was positive.  We surveyed a sample of 51 of the students in this class who undertook a further one-hour trading session as part of a separate research experiment.  These students rate the game as a valuable learning experience.  They suggest that their use of the game increased their understanding of share market and the way that prices are set.  While the study results cannot be generalised to all students in the course, the results suggest that there are benefits to be gained from including an electronic share market trading game as part of the course.

/pdf/market-games-in-finance-education-33vtstaerc.pdf

Alex Richardson

Papers

Trust and distrust in open source software development

Impact Of Computer Based Share Market Simulations On Learning: A Link Between Self-Efficacy And Understanding

Understanding negotiated anti-malware interruption effects on user decision quality in endpoint security

It’s not just action but also about reflection: Taking stock of agency research to develop a future research agenda

Market Games In Finance Education