Event Details

The Economics Department are delighted to host the Economics Seminar Series

The social dilemma for autonomous vehicles

Since Philippa Foot (1967) introduced the trolley problem, there has been a large literature on this moral issue. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and economists consider this problem relevant to their fields. Recently, this problem has become very important for the design of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The ethics of self-driving car crashes has sparked a lot of discussion. We suggest a new approach to this problem.

Cheating in a controlled experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk

We run a controlled experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk. By controlling the tasks the workers are required to solve (easy to cheat vs. difficult to cheat) we obtain estimates for the degree of dishonesty that exists in a non-proctored online environment. Our results have implications for institutions using online assessment tools and contribute to the current academic integrity and ethics literature.