Zentrale wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen

Normative differences of open science practices in university-industry research collaboration in Finland and China

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

Normative differences of open science practices in university-industry research collaboration in Finland and China Lattu, Annina Open science (OS) policies have become increasingly prominent, not only in the EU with initiatives like Plan S, but also in the US following the introduction of a new OS policy in 2022. In the People's Republic of China (PRC), OS is highlighted in science policy, particularly in the revised Science and Technology Progress Law of the People's Republic of China (2021). As industrial research and development gains value due to the increasing competition and knowledge intensity of the global economy, and with many governments cutting public research funding during the 2010s austerity trend, university-industry research collaboration (UIRC) has become increasingly common. This paper examines whether and how the OS movement has transformed norms in the UIRC context. By comparing multiple case studies, two from Finland and two from the PRC, this paper explores the normative differences between liberal meritocratic capitalist systems and political capitalist systems in terms of their OS practices, such as open access publishing, open data sharing, and science communication. The paper addresses two research questions: 1) What are the similarities and differences in the norms guiding the application of OS practices in UIRC in Finland and the PRC? 2) What do these differences reveal about the science systems of Finland and the PRC? This study applies institutional logics theory (Thornton et al., 2012) to illustrate the normative environment and its dynamics. The findings reveal that both countries share similar institutional logics that foster or hinder OS, including state, market, corporation, profession, and community logics, but with varying weight and manifestations. Finland's institutionalized OS policies and diverse community logics support OS adoption, while the PRC's OS norms in the UIRC context reflect stronger academic capitalism and global competitiveness, often applying OS selectively in areas that align with broader state-driven objectives. This paper contributes to the under-researched topic of OS in UIRC by comparing two distinct contexts: Finland, a small, forerunner country in open science, and the PRC, a rising global science superpower. It highlights how political and economic systems shape OS adoption, offering insights into the dynamics of OS practices in contrasting governance models.

Spousal Cooperation and Agricultural Technology Adoption

2026-04-14T00:00:00Z

Spousal Cooperation and Agricultural Technology Adoption Ndip, Francis E.; Maina, Cecilia Adoption of agricultural technologies is crucial for sustainable development, yet adoption of many relevant technologies remains low, especially among smallholder farmers in Africa. While there is an extensive literature aimed at understanding drivers of adoption, intra-household factors have received much less attention. In this study, we examine the relationship between spousal cooperation, an important intra-household factor, and the adoption of agricultural technologies among smallholder farmers in Cameroon. Specifically, we focus on improved seed varieties, inorganic fertilizers, intercropping, and minimum tillage as technologies. We combine survey and lab-in-the-field experimental data and employ multivariate probit models to account for simultaneous adoption. We also estimate associations between cooperation and the number of technologies adopted. The results suggest that spousal cooperation is positively associated with the adoption of improved varieties and intercropping. However, we find no associations between cooperation and adoption of inorganic fertilizers and minimum tillage, although the coefficients are positive. We also find that cooperation is positively associated with the number of technologies adopted. Lastly, we find interesting complementarities between the various technologies. Our findings suggest that promoting spousal cooperation could serve as an important leverage point for the adoption of modern agricultural technologies.

Towards Uncertainty-Aware Low-Bit Quantized LLMs for On-Device Inference

2026-03-06T00:00:00Z

Towards Uncertainty-Aware Low-Bit Quantized LLMs for On-Device Inference Sparrenberg, Lorenz; Schneider, Tobias; Deußer, Tobias; Berger, Armin; Sifa, Rafet Quantizing large language models (LLMs) significantly reduces memory usage and computational requirements, enabling efficient on-device inference. However, aggressive quantization can degrade model performance and exacerbate prediction uncertainty. To address this critical issue, we propose a logits-based calibration strategy where the model is restricted to generating a single token from a limited set of predefined decision tokens. By applying a temperature-scaled softmax directly on the logits corresponding to these tokens, we obtain calibrated and interpretable probability distributions, explicitly circumventing stochastic methods such as top-k sampling by directly leveraging deterministic logit values, revealing subtle behavioral shifts caused by quantization. Using Qwen-2.5 models ranging from 7\,B to 72\,B parameters at various quantization levels (2, 4, 6 and 8-bit), we evaluate our method across four recently released benchmarks encompassing regression (README++, CompLex-ZH, GIRAI) and classification (DarkBench) tasks. Thus, minimizing the risk of data leakage into pre-training data. Results indicate moderate quantization (4-bit) as optimal, particularly when combined with minimal few-shot prompting, enabling quantized LLMs to closely match or surpass proprietary models such as GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 in certain tasks. Our open-source toolkit facilitates straightforward deployment of reliable, uncertainty-aware quantized LLMs for privacy-preserving, on-device inference, making them suitable for sensitive settings such as human-subject economic experiments and survey analysis.

Cooperation under Comparison

2026-03-17T00:00:00Z

Cooperation under Comparison Stark, Oded; Kosiorowski, Grzegorz We establish a new approach to the modeling of cooperation, and we formulate a new solution concept for cooperative games. We do this by constructing a game of cooperation between individuals who exhibit distaste for relative deprivation, RD, in the sense that they experience stress when their income is lower than that of their comparators. In such a game, the sharing out of the jointly earned income between these individuals when they cooperate, as prescribed by standard solutions of cooperative games, might not be acceptable to the individuals. The stress from RD may have the upper hand. Measuring stress by RD, we thus model a setting in which two individuals who are concerned with being relatively deprived need to decide whether or not to cooperate. We term this setting an RD cooperative game, and we design a rule, the RD solution, for the distribution of the income yielded in this game. The RD solution prescribes cooperation in spite of cooperation-induced stress and preserves the spirit of standardness (an equal sharing of the gain that accrues from cooperation) for two-player games (a property shared by the main solution concepts for cooperative games).