Randomized controlled experiments are increasingly popular across the social sciences as the gold standard for identifying causal mechanisms underlying a wide range of social phenomena including collective action, social preferences, or market behavior. Because behavioral experiments are typically conducted with small groups sampled from student populations, a common critique is that they lack both scale and external validity. In this project, in collaboration with the eScience Center and Centerdata, we develop facilities for online experiments with participants recruited from panel surveys, more specifically the LISS panel, a long-running, high-quality and representative panel in the Netherlands. This would not only allow researchers to run online experiments with larger groups and representative samples, but crucially, also to capitalize on the data already available on panel respondents to enrich experimental designs with information on social-economic backgrounds, opinions, demographics, and more. See here for the project website.

This project studies the social and institutional conditions under which the remarkable level of trust observed in the recently booming “sharing economy” can emerge, alongside the further social implications of these exchanges. In particular, we study two claims: 1) that sharing economy platforms are capable of creating trust between strangers, regardless of their respective social backgrounds, and 2) that participation in the sharing economy increases generalized trust and social cohesion, also beyond these specific exchanges.  The project relies on an innovative combination of research methods: laboratory experiments, online experiments, digital user-generated data and survey data.  

The project focuses on transnational knowledge migrants (i.e. urban designers at the intersection with technology, culture and sustainability) in the creative industries and their role in shaping the urban as digital space. Creative knowledge migrants constitute an ideal case since they are "transversal enablers" that are able to connect local urban spaces to global ones. An analysis of their use of social media in cities allows for an understanding of the ways physical and digital spaces intersect and the role of these migrants in shaping the local through communicative practice and grouping processes. We carry out a pilot that will allow us to test the methodology based on language technology and social network analysis.

• dr. Paola Monachesi

Why would anyone engage in risky business with a total stranger? In this project, we analyze how criminals cooperate on Dark Web forums. We use rational choice and game theoretical explanations of individual trust and study effects of reputation, information diffusion and rule enforcement on exchanges in Dark Web criminal networks. We use text mining techniques, advanced social network analysis and agent-based models on unique longitudinal data of online exchanges from more than 13,000 Tor forum hosts to answer our research question.

• prof. dr. Stijn Ruiter