Departmental news

WMG at the University of Warwick is celebrating the completion of a major funded programme this week which has helped to add £220m to the Midlands economy.

A behavioural experiment led by researchers from the University of Warwick and University College London has revealed how poorer people are willing to contribute disproportionately more to the common good than the rich - but what people judge to be a ‘fair’ contribution overall may not be enough to solve collective problems.

The researchers recruited 240 participants to take part in a collective action game to investigate how inequalities, and different causes of inequalities, impact people's behaviour in a situation where individual interests conflict with group goals. The game is known as the ‘collective-risk social dilemma’ and is designed to represent the dynamics of international climate change negotiations.

Participants were randomly assigned to groups of four made up of two ‘richer’ individuals who were each given £20 and two ‘poorer’ individuals who were given £10. Groups were assigned to one of three treatments: in the merit treatment, participants’ wealth was determined by their performance in a task; in the luck treatment it was determined by a lottery; and in the uncertain treatment it was determined by either merit or luck (participants did not know which).

Players then had to decide how much of their fund to contribute towards a group target of £30 in 10 successive rounds. If they achieved the target together and had £30 in the group pot by the end of the 10th round, they were each able to take home any money they had leftover. But if the group failed to achieve the target, players faced the prospect of losing their remaining funds.

The researchers observed that what people judged to be a fair contribution was not enough to meet the target: if they acted according to what they thought was fair, they would fail as a group. The level of an individual’s wealth also influenced what they judged to be a fair contribution towards the group target, but the cause of their wealth did not.

When it came to contributions within the game, poorer individuals consistently contributed a higher proportion of their wealth (40.4% on average) than richer participants (37.5% on average), which further increased inequality within groups – particularly successful ones. This was true across all three treatments, indicating that the poor contributed disproportionately more regardless of the cause of wealth.

The researchers highlight that the findings are relevant to many real-world societal challenges, where what is judged to be a fair contribution at an individual level may ultimately be insufficient to overcome the problem.

Professor Daniel Sgroi said: “Many of society’s most pressing challenges, from combating climate change to dealing with pandemics, are collective action problems: situations in which individual and collective interests conflict with each other.”

“For example, since the Paris Agreement countries have outlined national targets to contribute to the reduction of global emissions, but they fall far short of the estimated 45% reduction required to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Similarly, individuals may face a dilemma about whether to alter their own behaviours to reduce emissions – weighing up the benefits to the common good with factors such as convenience and cost. Understanding which factors influence people’s willingness to make contributions is vital for the design of policies that support the attainment of collective goals.”

Read the full paper

‘When Fairness is Not Enough: The Disproportionate Contributions of the Poor in a Collective Action Problem’, by Eugene Malthouse, Charlie Pilgrim, Thomas Hills, and Daniel Sgroi is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. It is currently available as an Institute of Labor Economics discussion paper.

The paper is the first in a series that now involves more than 70 researchers across 37 countries. The series aims to explore the effect of different types of inequality in collective action problems.

Daniel Sgroi is Professor of Economics at Warwick. View his staff profile.

To participate as a speaker, please submit an abstract of 250-300 words for a fifteen-minute paper, along with a short bio (100 words max), to kinshipconference2024@gmail.com by 30th November 2023.

Please use this email address for any further question and see updates on our Twitter page: @kinshipconference2024.

Professor Roberta Bivins and Professor Mathew Thomson will present this year's Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2023 on an NHS theme in July.

Anniversary Fever? History and the Culture of Celebrating the Age of the NHS will take place on Thursday 6th July 2023, 6pm-8.30pm BST at Anatomy Theatre & Museum, Strand London, WC2R 2LS

For tickets and more information, please visit the event page.

About the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture

The Ben Pimlott Lecture is hosted by Twentieth Century British History, OUP Journals and King's Contemporary British History. This lecture series was established in 2006 in honour of the late Ben Pimlott and in association with the Institute of Contemporary British History, with which Ben had close ties. Each lecture is published in the journal and is available free online.

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) is launching a new Economic Advisory Council (EAC) to build on its Quarterly Economic Survey and to develop policies to get the economy and business growing.

Dennis Novy, CAGE Impact Director and Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, has been appointed as a member of the board.

The Council will bring together respected national and international economists and business leaders to provide expert advice and feedback to the BCC. Its work will be focused on supporting the BCC's long-standing and renowned programme of business research.

Shevaun Haviland, Director General of the BCC, said, 'We're a year out on a General Election and now is a pivotal moment for business. That is why we have set up an Economic Advisory Council to help shape and guide our economic policies to boost the UK's growth and prosperity.

'...I'm thrilled to have such a diverse range of prominent economic and business experts join us at the BCC. These people are national and global leaders in their fields and they will help guide and shape our economic priorities and focus into the future. Our aim is to fuse the practical acumen of entrepreneurs with the technical expertise of economists to help produce policy that will make a real difference to the UK's growth prospects.'

In response to his appointment, Dennis Novy said, 'I am delighted to be joining the Economic Advisory Council. The British Chambers of Commerce play a key role in helping businesses and their employees up and down the country to succeed in a challenging economic environment. These links also contribute to the public debate on economic policy.'

Membership of the EAC:

Vicky Pryce Former Head of Government Economics Service

Ben Allen Proposition Leader, Financial Sponsors and Executives, Coutts Bank

Steven Gray UK Export Finance Representative, West & Central Africa

Martin Shelford Start-up founder and business strategist

Adam Uszpolewicz Former CEO of Aviva Poland

Dame Teresa Graham Former Deputy Chair of the Better Regulation Commission, Chair of the Administrative Burdens Advisory Board (HMRC), Chair of the UK Finance SME Advisory Group

Professor Mairi Spowage Director, Fraser of Allander Institute

Professor Dennis Novy Professor of Economics, Warwick University

View Dennis Novy's staff profile

Congratulations to Dr Menglin Xu who has been awarded the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Post Doctoral Prize in Physics. Menglin was awarded this for their research on “First measurement of the Z→μ+μ− angular coefficients in the forward region of pp collisions at √s=13 TeV.

Congratulations to Dr Dmitrii Kolotkov who has been awarded the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Post Doctoral Prize in Physics. Dmitrii was awarded this for his work on 'Coronal seismology by slow waves in non-adiabatic conditions', doi: 10.3389/fspas.2022.1073664

Henry Sinclair-Banks, a PhD student in the the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), has won a Best Paper Award at ICALP 2023, the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS).

Henry's paper, co-authored with researchers from Germany and Poland: Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, and Karol Węgrzycki, addresses the coverability problem in vector addition systems (VASS), a well-known model of concurrent systems. Coverability is an algorithmic problem for the verification of "safety properties": whether the system always avoids a set of bad states. Henry and his co-authors determine how much time is required to solve this problem in the worst case. They develop an algorithm that improves upon the state of the art that has stood for forty years. They also prove that, in several settings, it is impossible to decide coverability substantially faster, unless there is also a faster algorithm for a classic problem such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and finding cycles of fixed length in graphs.

In total, 5 Warwick papers will appear at this year's ICALP:

• Michael Benedikt, Dmitry Chistikov, and Alessio Mansutti, "The complexity of Presburger arithmetic with power or powers",
• Sam Coy, Artur Czumaj, Peter Davies, and Gopinath Mishra, "Optimal (degree+1)-coloring in congested clique",
• Charilaos Efthymiou and Weiming Feng, "On the mixing time of Glauber dynamics for the hard-core and related models on G(n,d/n)",
• Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, Henry Sinclair-Banks, and Karol Węgrzycki, "Coverability in VASS revisited: Improving Rackoff's bound to obtain conditional optimality",
• Konstantinos Zampetakis and Charilaos Efthymiou, "Broadcasting with random matrices".

This July's ICALP will be the 50th edition of the conference.

When you purchase an IP-based spy (hidden) camera for surveillance, are you aware that others may be spying on what you are watching? Recent research by Samuel Herodotou in the Department of Computer Science, Warwick, as part of his third-year undergraduate dissertation project under the supervision of Professor Feng Hao, has revealed a wide range of vulnerabilities of a generic camera module that has been used in many best-selling hidden cameras. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, an attacker may capture your hidden camera's video/audio streams from anywhere in the world, and furthermore, take complete control of the camera as a bot to attack other devices in your home network. To launch the attack, all the attacker needs to know is merely your hidden camera’s serial number. It is estimated that these vulnerabilities affect millions of hidden cameras, mostly sold in America, Europe and Asia. The (insecure) peer-to-peer network that is used by the affected cameras is also being used by 50 million IoT devices as a general communication platform. Hence, many millions of other IoT devices may also be affected. Researchers have responsibly disclosed findings to the manufacturers, and a CVE has already been assigned. Samuel will present this research work at the 17th International Conference on Network and System Security (Canterbury, UK, 14-16 August 2023). More details can be found in the paper.

On Saturday the 20th of May, we brought together at the University of Warwick an international group of scholars working on various themes relating to themes of post-war return. The desired outcome was to initiate a discussion between scholars across disciplines, geographies, and periods, thinking about the subjective dimensions of homecoming. This is significant as this field has long been dominated by normative and prescriptive social science analysis. We were particularly interested how literary theory and criticism might fertilise detailed historical analysis, and specific examples from the past might enrich and nuance broader theorisation.

Our keynote speaker Kate McLaughlin from the University of Oxford got us going with a fascinating, challenging and provocative talk on the ‘silent’ veteran, using the particular example of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Her remarkable interweaving of philosophical theory, in particular drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, and close literary analysis, was remarkably applicable to historical analysis. Through the speech she made the figure of the ‘silent veteran’, a problematic in all our studies, a fruitful field of analysis. The importance of ‘listening’ to the silences was particularly resonant and significant to all the presenter’s studies.

The first session ‘What home? Disrupted Homecomings’ spoke very closely to some of the key themes of the conference. All three papers stressed different dimensions of the problematic of ‘home’: what constitutes home in the post-war, across time and place, and for different individuals. Professor Taylor Soja’s discussion of a British officer, dragged backward and forward across the Empire in the ‘Small Wars’ of the late-Victorian era, complicated how ‘home’ for many could be the Front itself, but also how this would change over one’s life. On the other side of the colonial divide, Rose Miyonga gave an account of the inability of many Kenyan men and women to come home, even 60 years after the Mau Mau conflict. Due to close ancestral ties to their land, which was taken by the colonial government, people continue to feel discombobulated so long afterwards. War however can also provide a tool for making one’s idea of home much more secure, as Amy Carney elucidated. In studying a German-born Jewish soldier in the American Army, she revealed that the war itself crystallised his identity as an American, which became, undisputedly, home.

Our next panel considered how women specifically experienced, and are represented in accounts of, post-war homecoming. Alison Fell gave a remarkable account of what place combatant women came to have in post-war memory and myth-making. Due to women’s personification as the nation, tied closely to traditional ideas of motherhood, the image of homecoming was the putting down of the rifle, used to protect the home, and the taking up once again of mothering roles. In a different register, Marcin Filipowicz analysed contemporary Czech literature to illustrate how women’s homecomings disrupt easy theorisations of good and evil in post-war contexts. His powerful rendition of a scene of violent homecoming of a female holocaust survivor, with real bearing on how we consider post-war homecoming, precisely indicated the value of an interdisciplinary approach to this subject.

The third and largest panel of the day considered the broad question of the politics of homecoming, and especially how veterans made claims on the state. Robin Bates introduced to the conference a theme which would come up repeatedly, the battle for veteran’s rights, in his case, Union veterans of the American Civil War. His conception of the struggle for veteran’s rights contrasted the very different idea of the veteran in contemporary Russia. Elena Racheva shared how since the fall of the Soviet Union the state has weaponised veterans for their own ends, slowly incorporating the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan as part of a glorious struggle in the defence of Russia. The instrumentalisation of veteran’s status was similarly demonstrated in Drew Flanagan’s discussion of French far-right activist François de la Rocque, who used his status of front-line soldier to resist allegations of collaboration. The final speaker of the panel, Susan Carruthers, spoke to a very different way post-war homecoming was framed by the state - through the British offering of ‘demob’ suits to returning servicemen. Hereby they were to be re-civilianised, although multiple groups (i.e women) were excluded.

Ably chaired by Holly Furneaux, our fourth panel brought the focus specifically on disability-centric histories of Homecoming. Nick Bailey spoke to a specific institution that mediated disabled homecomings, the British Corps of Commissionaires, with strong disciplinary overtones. This genealogy of veteran’s rights was continued by Michael Robinson, who discussed debates about provisions for veterans across Canada, Britain and Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, with a special focus on ‘invisible disabilities’. The different treatment in different countries was also reflected in Sofya Anisimova’s excellent reflection on disabled Imperial Russian officer veterans. Here too was remarkable picture of fluctuation over time, and the political uses of disability by the veterans themselves.

The final panel tied together many of the themes of the conference, discussing how veterans produce narratives that reflect on their homecoming. Chloe Storer spoke on reticence in her own oral histories with British Afghan veterans, linking back to the notions of silence considered in the keynote speech. Eamonn O’Keeffe spoke by contrast on a very talkative veteran, Shadrick Byfield, who leveraged his literacy and experiences with members of the elite to survive in Victorian Britain. The final speaker of our conference Dimo Georgiev showed how the staid, jargonistic, novels of Bulgarian International Brigadiers became standard reading in socialist Bulgaria, omitting the difficult realities of homecoming.

Altogether, the conference met the objectives we set wholeheartedly. This panoply of scholars has a real contribution to make to the study of the post-war, and to that end we seek to keep the momentum going with an edited collection. Such an opportunity is available with Routledge’s Warwick Series in the Humanities, which we hope to take advantage of in the coming months.