Beibei Han, Yingmei Wei, Qingyong Wang, Francesco Maria De Collibus, Claudio Tessone, MT²AD: multi-layer temporal transaction anomaly detection in ethereum networks with GNN, Complex & Intelligent Systems, Vol. 10 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
In recent years, a surge of criminal activities with cross-cryptocurrency trades have emerged in Ethereum, the second-largest public blockchain platform. Most of the existing anomaly detection methods utilize the traditional machine learning with feature engineering or graph representation learning technique to capture the information in transaction network. However, these methods either ignore the timestamp information and the transaction flow direction information in transaction network or only consider single transaction network, the cross-cryptocurrency trading patterns in Ethereum are usually ignored. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-layer Temporal Transaction Anomaly Detection (MT$^2$AD) model in Ethereum network with graph neural network. Specifically, for a given Ethereum token transaction network, we first extract its initial features including the structure subgraph and edge’s feature. Then, we model the temporal information in subgraph as a series of network snapshots according to the timestamp on each edge and time window. To capture the cross-cryptocurrency trading patterns, we combine the snapshots from multiple token transactions at a given timestamp, and we consider it as a new combined graph. We further use the graph convolution encoder with attention mechanism and pooling operation on this new graph to obtain the graph-level embedding, and we transform the anomaly detection on dynamic multi-layer Ethereum transaction networks as a graph classification task with these graph-level embeddings. MT$^2$AD can integrate the transaction structure feature, edge’s feature and cross-cryptocurrency trading patterns into a framework to perform anomaly detection with graph neural networks. Experiments on three real-world multi-layer transaction networks show that the proposed MT$^2$AD (0.8789 Precision, 0.9375 Recall, 0.4987 FbMacro and 0.9351 FbWeighted) can achieve the best performance on most evaluation metrics in comparison with some competing approaches, and the effectiveness in consideration of multiple tokens is also demonstrated. |
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Thomas Puschmann, Valentyn Khmarskyi, Green fintech: developing a research agenda, CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, 2024. (Journal Article)
Digitalization and sustainability have been the core drivers of transformation of the financial industry in recent years. In this context, green fintech plays a major role, which, however, is still an unexplored field in business, information systems and finance research. This paper conducts a systematic literature analysis and develops a research agenda based on a framework, which is derived from clustering 74 academic research papers. The framework consists of the four clusters strategy, organization, technology, and potentials along nine dimensions. The research agenda reveals that green fintech is still a very premature field of research. The analysis shows that areas like customer- and government-related services, insurance-oriented approaches and SDGs which focus on life on land and life below water are still rare and that most of the approaches focus on blockchain technology, while other financial technologies like artificial intelligence are still underrepresented. |
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Julian Kölbel, Markus Leippold, Jordy Rillaerts, Qian Wang, Ask BERT: How Regulatory Disclosure of Transition and Physical Climate Risks affects the CDS Term Structure, Journal of Financial Econometrics, Vol. 22 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
We use BERT, an AI-based algorithm for language understanding, to quantify regulatory climate risk disclosures and analyze their impact on the term structure in the credit default swap (CDS) market. Risk disclosures can either increase or decrease CDS spreads, depending on whether the disclosure reveals new risks or reduces uncertainty. Training BERT to differentiate between transition and physical climate risks, we find that disclosing transition risks increases CDS spreads after the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, while disclosing physical risks decreases the spreads. In addition, we also find that the election of Trump had a negative impact on CDS spreads for firms exposed to transition risk. These impacts are consistent with theoretical predictions and economically and statistically significant. |
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Daniel Fasnacht, Virtuelle Konsumwelten –Trends mit Risiken: Gastkommentar, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 21, 19 January 2024. (Newspaper Article)
Aus Asien kommt der Trend Social Commerce, der diverse Branchen und disruptive Technologien verbindet und so ein neues Kundenerlebnis schafft. Was bedeutet dieses Phänomen, und sind wir bereit dafür? |
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Giulio Cornelli, Sebastian Klaus Dörr, Leonardo Gambacorta, Ouarda Merrouche, Regulatory Sandboxes and Fintech Funding: Evidence from the UK, Review of Finance, Vol. 28 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Over fifty countries have introduced regulatory sandboxes to foster financial innovation. This article conducts the first evaluation of their ability to improve fintechs’ access to capital and attendant real effects. Exploiting the staggered introduction of the UK sandbox, we establish that firms entering the sandbox see an increase of 15% in capital raised post-entry. Their probability of raising capital increases by 50%. Sandbox entry also has a significant positive effect on survival rates and patenting. Investigating the mechanism, we present evidence consistent with lower asymmetric information and regulatory costs. |
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Marco Ceccarelli, Stefano Ramelli, Alexander Wagner, Low carbon mutual funds, Review of Finance, Vol. 28 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Climate change poses new challenges for portfolio management. In our not-yet-low carbon world, investors face a trade-off between minimizing their exposure to climate risks and maximizing the benefits of portfolio diversification. This paper investigates how investors and financial intermediaries navigate this trade-off. After the release of Morningstar's novel carbon risk metrics in April 2018, mutual funds labeled as "low carbon" experienced a significant increase in investor demand, especially those with high risk-adjusted returns. Fund managers actively reduced their exposure to firms with high carbon risk scores, especially stocks with returns that correlated more with the funds' portfolios and were thus less useful for diversification. These findings shed light on whether and how climate-related information can re-orient capital flows in a low carbon direction. |
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Daniel Fasnacht, Beyond the hype: sensitive data on the blockchain, CV Publishing AG, cryptovalleyjournal.com, https://cryptovalleyjournal.com/focus/background/beyond-the-hype-sensitive-data-on-the-blockchain/, 2024-01-15. (Scientific Publication In Electronic Form)
While the crypto market has experienced volatility and skepticism, the underlying blockchain technology has continually evolved since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. Though Bitcoin has doubled since last year, the focus has shifted to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and infrastructure protocols like Chainlink and Graph. |
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Paul AG Forbes, Gökhan Aydogan, Julia Braunstein, Boryana Todorova, Isabella C Wagner, Patricia L Lockwood, Matthew AJ Apps, Christian Ruff, Claus Lamm, Acute stress reduces effortful prosocial behaviour, eLife, Vol. 12, 2024. (Journal Article)
Acute stress can change our cognition and emotions, but what specific consequences this has for human prosocial behaviour is unclear. Previous studies have mainly investigated prosociality with financial transfers in economic games and produced conflicting results. Yet a core feature of many types of prosocial behaviour is that they are effortful. We therefore examined how acute stress changes our willingness to exert effort that benefits others. Healthy male participants – half of whom were put under acute stress – made decisions whether to exert physical effort to gain money for themselves or another person. With this design, we could independently assess the effects of acute stress on prosocial, compared to self-benefitting, effortful behaviour. Compared to controls (n = 45), participants in the stress group (n = 46) chose to exert effort more often for self- than for other-benefitting rewards at a low level of effort. Additionally, the adverse effects of stress on prosocial effort were particularly pronounced in more selfish participants. Neuroimaging combined with computational modelling revealed a putative neural mechanism underlying these effects: more stressed participants showed increased activation to subjective value in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula when they themselves could benefit from their exerted effort relative to when someone else could. By using an effort-based task that better approximates real-life prosocial behaviour and incorporating trait differences in prosocial tendencies, our study provides important insights into how acute stress affects prosociality and its associated neural mechanisms. |
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Yifei Liu, Mathias Gehrig, Nico Messikommer, Marco Cannici, Davide Scaramuzza, Revisiting Token Pruning for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation, In: IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, but their high computational cost, quadratic in the number of tokens, limits their adoption in computation-constrained applications. However, this large number of tokens may not be necessary, as not all tokens are equally important. In this paper, we investigate token pruning to accelerate inference for object detection and instance segmentation, extending prior works from image classification. Through extensive experiments, we offer four insights for dense tasks: (i) tokens should not be completely pruned and discarded, but rather preserved in the feature maps for later use. (ii) reactivating previously pruned tokens can further enhance model performance. (iii) a dynamic pruning rate based on images is better than a fixed pruning rate. (iv) a lightweight, 2-layer MLP can effectively prune tokens, achieving accuracy comparable with complex gating networks with a simpler design. We evaluate the impact of these design choices on COCO dataset and present a method integrating these insights that outperforms prior art token pruning models, significantly reducing performance drop from ~1.5 mAP to ~0.3 mAP for both boxes and masks. Compared to the dense counterpart that uses all tokens, our method achieves up to 34% faster inference speed for the whole network and 46% for the backbone. |
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Iraj Khalid, Belina Rodrigues, Hippolyte Dreyfus, Solène Frileux, Karin Meissner, Philippe Fossati, Todd Anthony Hare, Liane Schmidt, Mapping expectancy-based appetitive placebo effects onto the brain in women, Nature Communications, Vol. 15 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Suggestions about hunger can generate placebo effects on hunger experiences. But, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms are unknown. Here, we show in 255 women that hunger expectancies, induced by suggestion-based placebo interventions, determine hunger sensations and economic food choices. Functional magnetic resonance imaging in a subgroup (n = 57/255) provides evidence that the strength of expecting the placebo to decrease hunger moderates medial prefrontal cortex activation at the time of food choice and attenuates ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) responses to food value. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation linked to interference resolution formally mediates the suggestion-based placebo effects on hunger. A drift-diffusion model characterizes this effect by showing that the hunger suggestions bias participants’ food choices and how much they weigh tastiness against the healthiness of food, which further moderates vmPFC–dlPFC psychophysiological interactions when participants expect decreased hunger. Thus, suggestion-induced beliefs about hunger shape hunger addressing economic choices through cognitive regulation of value computation within the prefrontal cortex. |
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Christophe Viguerie, Raffaele Fabio Ciriello, Liudmila Zavolokina, Formative Archetypes in Enterprise Blockchain Governance: Exploring the Dynamics of Participant Dominance and Platform Openness, In: 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2024-01-03. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
It is widely assumed that blockchain should, in principle, lead to decentralization. Yet, in practice, many enterprise blockchains are highly centralized. To explain this conundrum, we conduct a multi-case study of four enterprise blockchains: Walmart DL Freight, Contour, Chronicled MediLedger, and Cardossier. Exploring the dynamics of participant dominance and platform openness during their formative stages, we theorize that these blockchains correspond to the distinct archetypes of Chief, Clan, Custodian, and Consortium, respectively. Importantly, these archetypes shape the subsequent evolution of the governance approach, thus explaining why and how enterprise blockchains with dominant participants and limited openness later exhibit more centralized governance. |
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Dzmitry Katsiuba, Mateusz Dolata, Gerhard Schwabe, Power of Language Automation: The Potential for Closing the Loop in Responding to Online Customer Feedback, In: Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024 (HICSS-57), Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2024-01-03. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Online customer feedback management is playing an increasingly important role for businesses. Quickly providing guests with good responses to their reviews can be challenging, especially as the number of reviews increases. To address these challenges, this paper explores the response process and the potential for AI augmentation in the formulation and quality assurance of responses. As part of a design science research approach, it proposes an orchestration concept for humans and AI in intelligence co-writing in the hospitality industry and a novel NLP-based solution, which combines the advantages of human and AI in one application. The evaluation of the developed artifact shows that it is currently not possible to close the loop and automate the response process completely. This study describes the necessary components and provides transferable design knowledge. It opens possibilities for practical applications of NLP and further IS research. |
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Mateusz Dolata, Gerhard Schwabe, Towards the Socio-Algorithmic Construction of Fairness: The Case of Automatic Price-Surging in Ride-Hailing, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 40 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Algorithms take decisions that affect humans, and have been shown to perpetuate biases and discrimination. Decisions by algorithms are subject to different interpretations. Algorithms’ behaviors are basis for the construal of moral assessment and standards. Yet we lack an understanding of how algorithms impact on social construction processes, and vice versa. Without such understanding, social construction processes may be disrupted and, eventually, may impede moral progress in society. We analyze the public discourse that emerged after a significant (five-fold) price-surge following the Brooklyn Subway Shooting on April 12 2022, in New York City. There was much controversy around the two ride-hailing firms’ algorithms’ decisions. The discussions evolved around various notions of fairness and the algorithms’ decisions’ justifiability. Our results indicate that algorithms, even if not explicitly addressed in the discourse, strongly impact on constructing fairness assessments and notions. They initiate the exchange, form people’s expectations, evoke people’s solidarity with specific groups, and are a vehicle for moral crusading. However, they are also subject to adjustments based on social forces. We claim that the process of constructing notions of fairness is no longer just social; it has become a socio-algorithmic process. We propose a theory of socio-algorithmic construction as a mechanism for establishing notions of fairness and other ethical constructs. |
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Xiaoyang Li, Haoming Feng, Hailong Yang, Jiyuan Huang, Can ChatGPT reduce human financial analysts’ optimistic biases?, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 12 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
This paper examines the potential of ChatGPT, a large language model, as a financial advisor for listed firm performance forecasts. We focus on the constituent stocks of the China Securities Index 300 and compare ChatGPT’s forecasts for major financial performance measures with human analysts’ forecasts and the realised values. Our findings suggest that ChatGPT can correct the optimistic biases of human analysts. This study contributes to the literature by exploring the potential of ChatGPT as a financial advisor and demonstrating its role in reducing human biases in financial decision-making. |
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Fabienne Kiener, Christian Eggenberger, Uschi Backes-Gellner, The role of occupational skill sets in the digital transformation: how it progress shapes returns to specialization and social skills, Journal of Business Economics / Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft, Vol. 94 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Workers’ occupational skill sets play a crucial role in successfully handling digital transformation. We investigate whether and how different types of occupational skill sets benefit from digital transformation. We theoretically and empirically analyze wage returns of workers in occupations with more or less specialized skill sets and with more or less social skills when IT increases in their industry. Applying natural language processing methods to the texts of occupational training curricula, we develop measures for occupational specialization and social skills. We use vocational education and training curricula from Switzerland because they cover approx. two-thirds of the working population. Using curricula, industry-level IT data and individual-level administrative wage data, our individual fixed-effects analyses show that IT progress leads to higher wage returns for workers in highly specialized occupations but not for workers in more general occupations. In addition, we find that high levels of social skills cannot make up for this difference when IT advances. However, our results indicate that for workers with high specialization, a combination with high social skills generates additional benefits when IT advances. Overall, our results suggest that, contrary to typical assumptions in educational policy debates, workers with specialized occupational skill sets - possibly in combination with high social skills - appear to be the ones who are particularly well prepared to cope with digital transformation. |
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Dina Pomeranz, Felipe Kast, Savings accounts to borrow less: experimental evidence from Chile, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 59 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Poverty is often characterized not only by low and unstable income, but also by heavy debt burdens. In a randomized field experiment with over 3,500 low-income micro-entrepreneurs in Chile, we find that providing access to free savings accounts decreases participants’ shortterm debt. In addition, participants who experience an economic shock have less need to reduce consumption, and subjective well-being improves significantly. Precautionary savings and credit therefore act as substitutes in providing self-insurance, and participants prefer borrowing less when a free formal savings account is available. Take-up patterns suggest that requests by others for participants to share their resources may be a key obstacle to saving. |
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Raphael Flepp, Oliver Merz, Egon Franck, When the league table lies: Does outcome bias lead to informationally inefficient markets?, Economic Inquiry, Vol. 62 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
We study whether outcome bias persists in markets with actors who are financially incentivized to make optimal decisions. We test whether inherently noisy match outcomes from European football are correctly incorporated into prices from a betting exchange market. We find that market prices overestimate (underestimate) the winning probability of teams that previously overperformed (underperformed) in terms of match outcomes compared to their performance based on “expected goals”. This pattern is mirrored in negative (positive) betting returns on overperforming (underperforming) teams. These results suggest that even competitive market mechanisms fail to completely erase outcome bias. |
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Carlos Gomez Gonzalez, Helmut Max Dietl, David Berri, Cornel Nesseler, Gender information and perceived quality: An experiment with professional soccer performance, Sport management review, Vol. 27 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
Whether one looks at revenue, investment or coverage, men’s sports do better than women’s. Many assume that absolute differences in quality of athletic performance are the driving force. However, the existence of stereotypes should alert us to another possibility: gender information might influence perceived quality. We perform an experiment in which 613 participants viewed clips of elite female and male soccer players. In the control group, participants evaluated unmodified videos where the gender of the players is clear to see. In the treatment group, participants evaluated the same videos but with gender obscured by blurring. Using a regression analysis, we find that participants rate men’s videos higher – but only when they know they are watching men. When blurring obscures the gender, ratings for female and male athletes do not differ. We discuss implications for research and the sports industry. |
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Ugo Albertazzi, Fulvia Fringuellotti, Steven Ongena, Fixed rate versus adjustable rate mortgages: Evidence from euro area banks, European Economic Review, Vol. 161, 2024. (Journal Article)
Why do residential mortgages carry a fixed or an adjustable interest rate? To answer this question we study unique data from 103 banks belonging to 73 different banking groups across twelve countries in the euro area. To explain the large cross-country and time variations observed, we distinguish between household conditions that determine the local demand for credit and the characteristics of banks that supply credit. As bank funding mostly occurs at the group level, we disentangle these two sets of factors by comparing the outcome observed for the same banking group across the different countries. Local household conditions dominate. In particular we find that the share of new loans with a fixed rate is larger when: (1) the historical volatility of inflation is lower, (2) the correlation between unemployment and the short-term interest rate is higher, (3) households’ financial literacy is lower, and (4) the use of local mortgages to back covered bonds and of mortgage-backed securities is more widespread. |
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Mateusz Dolata, Kevin Crowston, Making sense of AI systems development, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 50 (1), 2024. (Journal Article)
We identify and describe episodes of sensemaking around challenges in modern Artificial-Intelligence (AI)-based systems development that emerged in projects carried out by IBM and client companies. All projects used IBM Watson as the development platform for building tailored AI-based solutions to support workers or customers of the client companies. Yet, many of the projects turned out to be significantly more challenging than IBM and its clients had expected. The analysis reveals that project members struggled to establish reliable meanings about the technology, the project, context, and data to act upon. The project members report multiple aspects of the projects that they were not expecting to need to make sense of yet were problematic. Many issues bear upon the current-generation AI’s inherent characteristics, such as dependency on large data sets and continuous improvement as more data becomes available. Those characteristics increase the complexity of the projects and call for balanced mindfulness to avoid unexpected problems. |
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