Text Mining in Behavioral Economics with a Focus on the Solution of Social Dilemma Situations

Background:

The method of text mining, i.e. the computer-aided analysis of large amounts of text, has great potential to improve our understanding of economic decisions. Text mining offers a variety of possibilities for understanding people's economic behaviour and the deliberation processes behind their decisions.

Main research question:

How does communication affect cooperation?

The project is concerned with why communication helps to solve social dilemma situations. The basic economic problem in such situations is that cooperative behaviour has a positive externality (the private benefit is smaller than the social benefit), which means that individually optimal behaviour leads to little cooperation relative to the efficient level. It is known that communication helps to solve this dilemma. The project is about understanding the mechanism why this is so.

Research objective:

The aim is to establish text mining as a method in behavioural economics.