purple motes

Good government must respond effectively to administrative problems. In China, claims of wrongful government action are addressed through petitions to complaint offices (the Xinfang system) and through court cases (administrative litigation). From 1996 to 2004, Xinfang petitions were perhaps forty times as numerous as court cases.[1] How these two processes shape communication with persons not formally parties to the dispute may help to explain this outcome.

In an interesting recent paper, Taisu Zhang argues that the relatively large number of petitions doesn't indicate Chinese reluctance to pursue court cases. About the year 2000, the Xinfang system handled about five million petitions concerning civil matters. The number of civil cases in the court systems was about four million.[2] Thus the ratio of petitions to court cases is much lower for civil disputes than for administrative disputes. Persons are not relatively reluctant to bring court cases; they are relatively reluctant to bring administrative disputes to courts.

Zhang also argues that the relatively large number of petitions occurs even though petitioning is a much less propitious action. In administrative cases in China, plaintiffs' claims prevail in about 30% of cases. In contrast, only 0.2% of Xinfang petitions lead to "successful resolution of the dispute."[3] For a person seeking to prevail in a dispute, the Chinese court system offers better opportunities than the Xinfang system.

Zhang proposes that the adversarial nature of administrative litigation explains the relatively low number of administrative disputes brought to courts. Chinese administrative litigation law prohibits mediation in administrative cases. According to Zhang, the Chinese public prefers "more paternalistic and less confrontational methods": "the judge should appear as a benevolent 'Fu Mu Guan' ('father figure') who is seeking to solve problems through the least intrusive way possible."[4] Officials in the Xinfang system appear to be much closer to such a role.

Forms of communication about the dispute to non-disputants may also favor the Xinfang system. Chinese administrative litigation law requires that all cases receive a public trial. Zhang's paper says little about this requirement. A public trial does not necessarily make for a more adversarial proceeding. It can, however, expose the interests of the plaintiff to competitors outside of the dispute. Public, authoritative accounts of disputes and decisions fosters the rule of law. In circumstances of intense socio-economic competition not well-structured by an effective legal system, serving as a public example through administrative litigation can have considerable private costs along with the public benefits. The Xinfang system, in contrast, requires no particular written statements and no public account.[5]

The Xinfang system also gives disputants better opportunities to frame the dispute in a way that appeals to others. Litigation involves highly structured forms and patterns of communication. Petitioning, in contrast, allows the petitioner much more freedom in communicating the dispute to others. While class-action litigation requires considerable conceptual and organizational support, mass petitions naturally occur and in fact tend to be associated with mass incidents. Transforming specific administrative problems into more general problems of social unrest makes those problems less informative.[6]

Requiring Xinfang petitions to be submitted according to a specific written form and requiring responses to Xinfang petitions to be described publicly might encourage the development of law-oriented procedures for resolving administrative disputes. More generally, how to get better formed communication about administrative problems is a key challenge for good government.

Notes:

[1] Zhang (2008) p. 4.
[2] Id. p. 24.
[3] Id. p. 13.
[4] Id. p. 5.
[5] Minzer (2006) pp. 161-2 notes that petitions made as in-person visits rose from 59% of petitions in 1990 to 78% of petitions in 2001. In an in-person visit, the petitioner need not commit any information to writing.
[6] Minzer (2006) argues that Xinfang regulations encourage the politicization of grievances.

References:

Minzner, Carl F. (2006), "Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions," 42 Stanford Journal of International Law, v. 42, pp. 103-79.

Zhang, Taisu, "The Xinfang Phenomenon: Why the Chinese Prefer Administrative Petitioning Over Litigation" (February 27, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1098417

Offer Comments

An insightful communication scholar wrote:

in all communication, in so far as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love. Those who have loved over many years may reach a point where almost all masks are gone. But never all. The lover's plight is tied to the fact that every one of us puts on a mask to address himself, too. Such masks to relate ourselves to ourselves we also try to put aside and with wisdom and grace we to some extent succeed in casting them off. When the last mask comes off, sainthood is achieved, and the vision of God. But this can only be with death.[1]

Let's get naked?

[1] Walter Ong (1975), "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction," in An Ong reader: challenges for further inquiry, ed. by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2002) pp. 425-6.

Offer Comments

Natural philosophers in the eighteenth century communicated with each other ideas and observations to form a republic of letters that advanced knowledge of the world. An influential, late-eighteenth-century leader of the Scottish Enlightenment wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.[1]

Somewhat later in the same work, he also wrote of the industrialist:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.[2]

While these quotes are fairly well known, their concern with communication (address, talk, affection, words) tends to be under-appreciated. Underlying these quotes seems to be anxiety that too intense interest in claiming to serve the public good doesn't do so. Perhaps that was an issue, not just for butchers and bakers, but also for natural philosophers participating in the eighteenth-century republic of letters.

Altruism at different levels of analysis has created heated contention among sociobiologists since the 1960s. Groups of sociobiologists opposing group selection have vigorously competed with groups promoting various forms of group selection. Groups opposing group selection have generally been more symbolically fecund and have gained higher scholarly value than groups promoting group selection. Hence, over time, group selection has faded as an issue among sociobiologists.

Attention to different loci of heritable differentiation helps to explain this outcome. Sociobiologists have been invested in research focused on genes as the locus of heritable differentiation. Shared symbolic and physical capital plays a larger role in group competition. Sociologists and economists are better positioned to analyze these assets. Hence, given disciplinary competition for resources, the assets of sociobiology favored the demise of group selection within sociobiology.

An important aspect of the demise of group selection was changes in the way of discussing the issue. One approach was to assert a new multilevel selection theory purportedly having little relation to the old, devalued theory. Another approach was to avoid the topic of group selection.[3] Discussing selection of kin, who share genes, can serve in either of these approaches. Two leading sociobiologists observed:

We could cite dozens of theoretical and empirical articles from the current literature that describe selection within and among groups without mentioning the term "group selection" or anything else about the group selection controversy.[4]

One might wish that the scholarly world functioned more ideally than this. Appealing to new sociobiological research, these two sociobiologists urge a "back to basics" approach in which "[m]multilevel selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology in the future."[5]

Scientists, like Adam Smith, should take multilevel selection theory more seriously. Competition among sociobiologists depends on network-embedded symbolic and physical assets: published scholarly papers in sociobiology journals, departmental positions at research institutions, and physical assets for research (laboratories, field stations, graduate students) within networks of disciplined scientific alliances. Advocating group selection theory probably isn't in sociobiologists' individual interests, or in the interests of sociobiology in competition with other academic disciplines. Multilevel selection theory is most likely to prosper with more sophisticated ways of discussing the issue, or with the emergence of different competing scholarly groups.

Notes:

[1] Smith (1776), I.2.2

[2] Id. IV.2.9

[3] Wilson and Wilson (2007) p. 344.

[4] Id.

[5] Id. p. 327

References:

Wilson, David Sloan and Eward O. Wilson (2007), "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology," The Quarterly Review of Biology v. 82 no. 4 (Dec.) pp. 327-348.

Smith, Adam (1776), The Wealth of Nations, 5'th ed., edited by ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1904).

1 Comment

Most person-to-person communication occurs between persons who know each other well (family and close friends). A recent study of a large number of mobile phone voice calls found that in an 18-week period, about two-thirds of mobile phone users engaged in mutual calling with only two other persons. The mean number of partners for mutual calling in that period was three.[1] Mutual calling partners with more mutual calling partners in common spent on average more time in calls with each other.[2] Mutual calling appears to have increasing returns in personal familiarity.

Recent neuroscience research points to neural functioning that supports this macro-behavioral pattern. The suppression of a certain brain wave pattern (mu activity) is associated with sub-conscious processing of the present activity of another person. Premotor neurons that perform such sub-conscious processing have been called mirror neurons. Mu activity, and by implication mirror neuron activity, depends on familiarity with the other person:

mu activity was suppressed most when subjects watched videos of themselves, indicating the greatest mirror neuron activity. For both groups [autistic and non-autistic children], the measurements showed a slightly lower level of suppression when subjects watched familiar people in the video and the least when watching strangers.[3]

Recognition of another is typically considered to be a high-level neural function. Familiarity with another, however, appears to associated with (downloaded) resources for sub-conscious processing of another's actions.

Persons highly value in communication making sense of presence. The relation of mu activity to personal familiarity is consistent with personal familiarity being a resource for making sense of presence. Presence as a value, and familiarity as a resource, provide a structure for increasing returns in mutual calling.

[1] See Analysis of a large-scale weighted network of one-to-one human communication, Jukka-Pekka Onnela et al 2007 New J. Phys. 9 179 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/9/6/179, Fig. 4 and Table 1.

[2] See Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks, J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramäki, J. Hyvönen, G. Szabó, D. Lazer, K. Kaski, J. Kertész, and A.-L. Barabási, PNAS 104, 7332-7336 (2007), preprint, pp. 4-5. Overview of this paper here.

[3] From "Mirror, Mirror In The Brain: Decoding Patterns Reflecting Understanding Of Self, Others May Further Autism Therapies," Society for Neuroscience News Release, 11/04/07, summarizing L. M. Oberman, V. S. Ramachandran, J. A. Pineda, "Mirror Neuron Activity Modulated by Actor Familiarity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: an EEG Study," 2007 Neuroscience Meeting Planner. San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, 2007, abstract on EBDblog. The sentence following the above quoted excerpt states, "This indicates that normal mirror neuron activity was evoked when children with autism watched family members, but not strangers." The abstract states, "Both neurotypical participants and those with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] showed greater suppression to familiar individuals compared to the stranger." These and the above descriptions appear to be inconsistent, but that is not relevant to the point here.

1 Comment

Multisensory processing in primates, like information processing on the Internet, is extensively decentralized. A recent neuroscience review article declared:

The pervasiveness of multisensory influences on all levels of cortical processing compels us to reconsider thinking about neural processing in unisensory terms. Indeed, the multisensory nature of most, possibly all, of the neocortex forces us to abandon the notion that senses ever operate independently during real-world cognition.[1]

Within the ascending auditory pathway prior to the neocortex, neurons in the inferior colliculus respond to auditory signals. Recent research found that about two-thirds of neurons in the inferior colliculus also respond to visual signals. In addition, about 20% of the neurons fire with eye movement motor activity.[2] These empirical results are consistent with the general model of perception-action cycles embedded throughout all levels of sensory processing.

Important communications services filter multisensory information at significant cost. Text and text messaging constrain communication to visual symbols. Telephone calls limit communication to auditory signals. Human beings successfully communicate despite these sensory constraints. Real-world communication behavior, however, indicates that these constraints impose significant bodily costs. Communications services that provide multisensory communication, i.e. audiovisual streams like television, vastly predominate in the allocation of persons' time using communication services.

Sensory-constrained communication services have some offsetting advantages. Creating a PicturePhone was not enough to create a valuable communication service. Different sensory forms have different implications for multi-person communication, emotional distance, time patterns in dialogue, and many other pragmatic aspects of communication. For example, text messaging can be done surreptitiously in circumstances, such as a class or meeting, where other forms of communication would be more readily noticed. Sensory-limited communication is likely to persist even when multisensory communication is cheap, highly capable, and widely available.

Human beings make multisensory sense of unimodal communications relatively well compared to current non-biological information processors. An efficient distribution of computation between humans and non-biological devices apparently favors non-biological devices creating television programs rather than similar radio programs. But given a stream of silent images, humans can generate a descriptive stream of audio for those images much more quickly, cheaply, and accurately than can current non-biological technology. Understanding better how humans make multisensory sense from unimodal communication might provide insights into improving the weak performance of non-biological devices in such tasks.

Notes:

[1] Ghazanfar, Asif A. and Charles E. Schroeder, "Is neocortex essentially multisensory?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences, v. 10, n. 6 (June 2006) pp. 278-86.

[2] Porter, Kristen Kelly, Ryan R. Metzger, and Jennifer M. Groh, "Visual- and saccade-related signals in the primate inferior colliculus," PNAS v. 104, n. 45 (Nov. 6, 2007) pp. 17855-17860. Cited (approximate) figures are based on the figures reported in Table 1 (63.9% and 19.4% are figures to the full precision given).

3 Comments

From: Blog Carnival Message Forwarder
Reply-to: ZZZZ
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Your Uncle ZZZZ from YYYY says Hello, would like to get in touch with you. Hope you're doing well. Planning a trip to D.C. in the fall. Would enjoy having you visit me on the farm for a few days.

----------------

From: Douglas Galbi
To: ZZZZ
Subject: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Uncle ZZZZ, is that really you, or is this some kind of scam? Here's a test question: what sort of farming did you like best (I still remember what you told me).

------------------

From: Suzanne
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Re: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Hi Doug I always did vegetable farming. Last time I saw you was at your uncle F---s' 50th wedding anniversary. Am going to Maine for a week to see my grandson Scot. Would like to get in touch with you after. Uncle ZZZZ

------------------

From: Suzanne
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Re: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

I forgot, I grow Lilacs. Looking forward to hearing from you. Uncle ZZZZ

------------------

From: Douglas Galbi
To: Suzanne
Subject: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

I'm a bit suspicious. About twenty-five years ago, when I visited his farm as a kid, my Uncle ZZZZ told me the kind of farming that he liked best is having the government pay him not to grow stuff. I thought that was a great idea, so I decided that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. But I couldn't get land. Still don't have any land.

Hmm, what are phonebooks good for?

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And that's the last I heard from Suzanne/Uncle ZZZZ. I called my Uncle ZZZZ and left a message about these emails, along with my telephone number. About a week later, Uncle ZZZZ called my brother and told him to tell me that I was welcomed to come and visit him on his farm.

OpenID and other identity technologies cannot solve these sorts of communication problems. Identity is a social problem. Not having communicated with someone for a long time makes misidentification more likely.

Offer Comments

According to Communications Daily (June 21), Motorola CEO Ed Zander stated in his keynote address at NXTcomm that Motorola next summer will have a mobile device that allows persons to talk and share photos at the same time. Much evidence suggests that such capability has significant value in communication.

While delivering video to mobiles is attracting more industry attention, I think that the possible upside for show-and-tell devices is bigger than for mobile video. Design and marketing will be significant challenges. On the other hand, in-stream photo sharing is closely related to highly successful mobile voice and SMS charging models. In-stream photo-sharing can easily draw upon well-established user understandings of payment for communications services. That's not the case for watching video on mobiles.

1 Comment

Typing text on a keyboard and manipulating a mouse are recent, conventional muscular routines for communication. Those routines have little relation to the muscular practices of communication that humans have used throughout their evolutionary history. Moreover, those routines are much different from muscular activities many people do for enjoyment, such as walking, playing catch, running, playing tag, swimming, and curling. Making communication services more muscularly natural and muscularly enjoyable could create additional value.

In conjunction with the use of sight and clever extra-body technology, a person can write with any muscle at speeds comparable with those of current keyboard routines. The Dasher Project allows a person to write text by directing a point across dynamic, letter-coded regions. With the appropriate linking technology, any muscle, including eye gaze movements, can direct the point to write. Such technology obviously has great value to disabled persons. For persons with a wide range of muscular possibilities, such technology allows communication service providers to offer muscular routines that are natural, enjoyable, and propitious for the specific circumstances of use.

You can use your hands in ways that are much more natural and satisfying than typing on a keyboard. Jeff Han has developed a multi-point graphical interaction surface that is pleasurable even to watch. The forthcoming Apple iPhone, 8 million of which are expected to be sold in its first year on the market, incorporates some touch-screen gestures for controlling the phone.

Highly successful products suggest the value of innovation in the space of muscular movement. Dance Dance Revolution (Dancing Stage) has brought large-muscle leg movement to video games. The Wii video console controller includes motion sensors that enable, for example, sports games to incorporate sports-typical gestures. The Apple iPhone also incorporates motion sensors, as does the recently announced DoCoMo D904i.

I'm still hoping for a mobile camera-phone that better communicates "Look at this!"

Offer Comments

One of the best-supported empirical economic models is known as the gravity equation. According to this equation, trade between two regions is proportional to the product of economic activity (GDP) in the two regions divided by the inter-region distance raised to about 0.9.[1] This relationship is formally similar to Newton's law of universal gravitation, except that distance is raised to the power 0.9 rather than squared.

The effect of distance in the gravity equation is not just a matter of transportation costs. According to a recent study, the significance of distance for trade fell from 1870 to 1950, but then rose through to the present. The distance exponent was 24% larger in the 1990s than it was from 1870 to 1969. The variance of these estimates is such that this difference is significant at a 1% level of significance.[2] Changes in transportation costs are an unlikely explanation for this temporal pattern.

The gravity equation holds in some circumstances of zero transportation costs. For free, taste-dependent goods (music, games, and pornography) consumed over the Internet, the distance effect is similar to that in the general gravity equation. When acquiring those goods involves a financial transaction, the distance effect is much larger. In contrast, Internet-based acquisition of goods such as financial information, technology information, and software does not depend on distance.[3]

Increased physical distance is associated with greater taste difference and greater difficulty in establishing trust. Distance is thus relevant for communication networks even when distance does not drive communication service costs.

Notes:

[1] Disdier, Anne-Cèlia and Head, Keith (2004), "The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade," Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano Working Paper No. 186, p. 24.

[2] Ibid., p. 18.

[3] Blum, Bernardo and Goldfarb, Avi, "Does the Internet Defy the Law of Gravity?" Journal of International Economics, forthcoming.

1 Comment

User-to-user recommendations within a large online retailer's recommendation system generated a very small share of sales. With keen business sense (see Netflix) and with praiseworthy regard for the common intellectual good, this retailer allowed some experts to analyze freely a large database of its users’ recommendations and to publish publicly their analysis. The database includes all recommendations that the online retailer’s users made for books, music, and movies from June, 2001 to May 2003.

The online retailer’s recommendation system worked as follows:

Each time a person purchases a book, music, or a movie [DVD or video] he or she is given the option of sending emails recommending the item to friends. The first person to purchase the same item through a referral link in the email gets a 10% discount. When this happens the sender of the recommendation receives a 10% credit on their purchase. [1]

The database includes persons who purchased and made a recommendation, and persons who received a recommendation. The database does not include persons who made a purchase but neither made a recommendation to another person nor received a recommendation from another person.

Purchases that generate recommendations generated few recommendations. Persons who purchased a book and recommended that book made on average 2.0 recommendations per purchased book.[2] Notice that this statistic by definition can be no less than 1: purchases that produced zero recommendations were not recorded in the dataset. To estimate the average number of recommendations per purchase, one needs an estimate of purchases that did not produce a recommendation.

Only a small share of purchases generated a recommendation. Persons who received a recommendation and then purchased the recommended book forwarded the recommendation to another person in about 24% of such purchases.[3] Imitation and concern for social norms have a pervasive and powerful effect on human behavior. The share of purchases in which a person who did not receive a recommendation for a book, but nonetheless purchased it and recommended it is surely less than 24%. That implies that the total number of books purchased per year was higher that 6.1 million, probably much higher. Two plausible figures are 100 million and 30 million.[4] These figures imply shares of purchases that generated a recommendation at 1.4% and 4.9%, respectively.

The overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is much lower than 2. Suppose that the retailer was selling 100 million books per year (the results are qualitatively the same if the retailer was selling only 30 million books per year). Given 2.0 recommendations per book purchase for purchases that produced a recommendation, the overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is 0.028. Making a recommendation created the possibility of a 10% credit for the recommender and a 10% discount for the receiver. Nonetheless, relatively few recommendations were made.

The share of purchases that resulted from user recommendations is miniscule. If the retailer was selling 100 million books per year, then less than a tenth of one percent (0.04%) of purchases followed from users’ recommendations. User social networking through a systematized recommendation system wasn’t a major driver of sales.

Nonetheless, the user recommendation system may have net positive value to the retailer. About 43,000 book purchases per year can plausibly be attributed to user recommendation of books through the retailers’ system.[5] Suppose that the average book price was $30 and the average gross margin was 60%. Then the user recommendation system generated a gross margin of about $800,000 per year. That might be sufficient to make it a profitable feature.

Recommendation systems have major effects on sales. One unsourced report indicated that “35 percent of [Amazon’s] product sales result from recommendations.” Greg Linden, who should know, stated (see comments), “Personalization was responsible for well more than 20% of sales when I left Amazon in 2002.” Automated recommendations probably account for most of the sales through recommendations.

A trade-off between communicative control and potential social effects is an important aspect of social networking. Commentary on the recommendation analysis has largely neglected this issue (for relevant discussion, see here, here, and here, for starters). Being personally responsibility for an online retailer sending a specific purchase offer to a social connection has some social meaning that a potential sender might prefer not to evaluate, and in any case the user cannot change the message sent. The social diffusion of given names, and business successes that arose through social networking, such as Hotmail, Google, MySpace, Youtube, and others, depended on more loosely structured forms of communication.

[1] See Leskovec, Jurij, Lada A. Adamic, and Bernardo A. Huberman, "The Dynamics of Viral Marketing," p. 3.

[2] See Leskovec, Jure, Ajit Singh, and Jon Kleinberg, "Patterns of Influence in a Recommendation Network (pdf), Table 1. The total number of book purchases was 2,859,096 over the 711 day period.

[3] Leskovec et. al., "Dynamics of Viral Marketing," p. 8, Table 3.

[4] See Brynjolfsson, Erik, Michael D. Smith, and Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, ""Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers" (pdf), Management Science, v. 49 n. 11 (Nov. 2003) p. 1587, and Sandoval, Greg, "Amazon Losing Ground in Core Area: Books," CNet News.com (Nov. 5, 2001).

[5] Leskovec et. al., "Patterns of Influence," Table 1 (figure annualized).

1 Comment