The use of AI in legal systems: determining independent contractor vs. employee status.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker's status-employee vs. independent contractor-in two common law countries (the U.

An observational study of health care provider collaboration networks and heterogenous hospital cost efficiency and quality outcomes.

Provider network structure has been linked to hospital cost, utilization, and to a lesser degree quality, outcomes; however, it remains unknown whether these relationships are heterogeneous across different acute care hospital characteristics and US states. The objective of this study is to evaluate whether there are heterogeneous relationships between hospital provider network structure and hospital outcomes (cost efficiency and quality); and to assess the sources of measured heterogeneous effects. We use recent causal random forest techniques to estimate (hospital specific) heterogeneous treatment effects between hospitals' provider network structures and their performance (across cost efficiency and quality).

WikiArtVectors: Style and Color Representations of Artworks for Cultural Analysis via Information Theoretic Measures.

With the increase in massive digitized datasets of cultural artefacts, social and cultural scientists have an unprecedented opportunity for the discovery and expansion of cultural theory. The WikiArt dataset is one such example, with over 250,000 high quality images of historically significant artworks by over 3000 artists, ranging from the 15th century to the present day; it is a rich source for the potential mining of patterns and differences among artists, genres, and styles. However, such datasets are often difficult to analyse and use for answering complex questions of cultural evolution and divergence because of their raw formats as image files, which are represented as multi-dimensional tensors/matrices.

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution.

Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years.

Reciprocity and exclusion in informal financial institutions: An experimental study of rotating savings and credit associations.

Group cooperation is fundamental to human society. The public goods game is often used to describe the difficulty of group cooperation. However, there are other structures of institutions to maintain group cooperation such as Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs).

Strict or graduated punishment? Effect of punishment strictness on the evolution of cooperation in continuous public goods games.

Whether costly punishment encourages cooperation is one of the principal questions in studies on the evolution of cooperation and social sciences. In society, punishment helps deter people from flouting rules in institutions. Specifically, graduated punishment is a design principle for long-enduring common-pool resource institutions.