Doron Kliger

As the climate becomes more extreme and heat waves become more prevalent, the effects of climate change spill over into previously unnoticed areas. One such prominent result of global warming is the adverse effect of outdoor weather on pedestrians at night. To investigate this rather overlooked effect, we carried out a large-scale field study in 232 different locations in three different cities in Israel–Tel Aviv-Yafo (106 locations), Haifa (49 locations), and Beersheba (77 locations). The study, involving 30,216 observations on the feeling/s of safety (FoS) performed by 491 participants, started in August 2019 and lasted almost one year. As the study reveals, people feel safer, with all other factors being constant, when the temperature is moderate and humidity is high. According to the study findings, if temperature increases from 25 °C to 30 °C, illumination should be increased by ~20 lx to maintain the same level of FoS. However, if the temperature drops, less illumination can be supplied, which makes a case for smart illumination policies. As providing sufficient FoS is important for an active life outdoors, this study generates knowledge that can help support active and secure mobility in urban areas and beyond. As temperatures rise and humidity patterns change, our findings may have broad implications for urban areas worldwide, both in Israel and beyond.

Whether we like it or not, algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMSs) are all around us. These systems assist both public institutions and private organizations in making decisions that exert a significant impact on our lives. The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems and the potential risks of using them are the subjects of intensive, ongoing research. It is imperative to ensure their fairness and transparency. The understanding that ADMSs should be subject to human supervision and examined for laypeople’s perceived fairness is clear. Laypeople’s perceptions regarding ADMSs’ fairness, their understanding of the reasons underlying the systems’ outcome (decision), and their comprehension of the linkage between the explanations and the results, influence their willingness to trust the systems, use them and accept their decisions. To determine and better understand which factors affect laypeople’s perceptions of the fairness of algorithmic decisions, we conducted an online between-subject experiment, employing a case study of a simulated AI-based recruitment decision-support system. We focused on three aspects: system characteristics (SC), personality characteristics (PC), and demographic characteristics (DC). We conducted an in-depth analysis to determine which explanation increases the perceived fairness the most. Based on the results, we suggest a framework for predicting a layperson’s perception of the fairness of the explanations. Our findings may help in understanding how to involve humans in the development and evaluation process of ADMSs, how to create personalized explanations based on the SC as well as on users’ PC and DC, and, consequently, how to enhance laypeople’s fairness perceptions regarding ADMSs.

I am a behavioral economist, who is interested in both behavioral sciences and economic behavior. By the term “economic behavior” I refer to the calculative reasoned domain of economic analysis, whereas by “behavioral economics” I address aspects of human feelings, emotions and everything that is not captured by the “rational” paradigm. Evidently, erroneous calculations, as well as unhinged sentiments lead to economic losses, and every change in the economics of the world has both calculative and behavioral sides to it. In what follows, we examine these two sides of behavior in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic by drawing on contemporaneous data, forecasts, and images. Each side of behavior reveals distinctive insights, and intriguingly, not all outcomes count as loss. As we face this crisis, there is a clear environmental gain that we would be smart to preserve post pandemic.

Recently, we have seen energy-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) light bulbs rapidly replace incandescent ones. However, results of new research are indicative of adverse health impacts of LED lighting, which is characterized by enriched blue light. Our study aims to reveal whether using color priming by attaching red/green traffic-light icons on light bulbs influences consumers’ preferences of light bulbs. We conducted a field study simulating the buying process, in which participants (N = 572) were presented with LED and carbon incandescent bulbs. We alternately displayed two pairs of bulbs: (1) in their original packaging and (2) in packages marked with traffic light icons (red = LED). Our results confirm that traffic light icons significantly (p < 0.01) increase the odds of choosing the healthier carbon bulb. The results highlight the benefits of attaching traffic light icons to light bulb packaging, helping consumers to make more health-conscientious purchasing decisions. Nowadays, this study’s contribution is more significant due to COVID-19 restrictions and stay-at-home policies, since people work or study remotely, which increases their exposure to household lighting. These results may incentivize policymakers to enforce adding traffic light icons to light bulb packaging, thus encouraging LED light bulb manufacturers to reduce the blue light component in order to improve the health aspect of their bulbs.

We invoke the famous Louis XIV quote “L'État, c'est moi,” applying it to the corporate world, and introduce the novel idea that a self-serving bias, which we define as “I Am The Firm,” is infused within the culture of certain companies. We hypothesize that the owners of eponymous firms – firms that bear the names of their owners – experience enhanced self-identification with their firms, and thus tend to inject their own subjective beliefs and desires into the realistic objective prospects of the firms. The “I am the firm” effect is a form of a self-serving bias, which arises from the blurring of boundaries between the owner and the corporate eponymy entity that carries the same name. Employing a unique corporate setting in Israel, we demonstrate that eponymous firms disclose unduly optimistic biased forecasts relative to their non-eponymous counterparts, which cannot be validated or justified solely by rational explanations. The obfuscation of the boundaries in eponymous firms between subjective illusory desires and objective realistic truths is revelatory and has far-reaching implications in various aspects of corporate decisions, which we suggest will require future research.