Using smart systems to incentivize sustainable behaviors of individuals
Name
1192966815-MIT.pdf
Size
9.19 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f50e84d0a5eb6c28490bc74b682d8dea
Author(s)
Novak, Lucas(Lucas D.)
Advisor(s)
Alex 'Sandy' Pentland.
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
New technology has created new tools to invest in sustainable development to fight major problems like climate change, inequality, and rebuilding communities after disasters. This new technology has created new sources of data and when coupled with modern data analytic methods, creates a way to measure the sustainable behaviors of individuals. This thesis discusses how the ability to measure sustainable behaviors of individuals creates new ways to incentivize these sustainable behaviors. We developed an app that measures behaviors using data from smartphones to facilitate field experiments that measure the power of incentive mechanisms. We used this app to conduct a pilot study at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in South Australia. This study measured how festival-goers valued the gender diversity of artists and incentivized participants by showing them the actual percentage of women/non-binary artists they saw. We discuss what changes need to be made to this app to enable future studies and propose an experiment that uses an updated version of the app to incentivize tourists to visit communities affected by natural disasters, specifically Kangaroo Island which has been impacted by bushfires and COVID-19.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, May, 2020
Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-69).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
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