HWS · Harmony within society

Our living together is confronted with new challenges, as our modern world widens our public sphere and smushes together groups with different value systems. In turn, agents take refuge in safe spaces, where their behavior and speech are protected from bad inferences. This ambitious project aims at proposing a unified framework- building on the role of the dissemination of personal information- to study social interactions, and at fostering the academic community’s engagement on the study of these new challenges. The first part will build a framework for divisive behaviors (for which agents do not agree on what’s right and wrong). It will endogenize safe spaces and investigate their dark side (externalities, tribal behaviors, outings) as well as their (in)ability to foster the learning of social norms. It will also study theoretically and empirically how society and organizations create a common identity by defining legitimate conversation and designing common narratives. The second part will challenge the received wisdom that transparency is beneficial for consensual behaviors and will bring evidence in this regard; the argument will be based on the first modelling of moral licensing, then applied to the coexistence of public and private spheres; and on the formalization of when the right to oblivion is desirable. Finally, and in line with the commonality argument, the project will investigate coopetition, with implications for international cooperation in innovation and competition policy.