arXiv subjects

Denis Bonnay

Publications and source records attributed to Denis Bonnay.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Self-directed online information search can affect policy support: a randomized encouragement design with digital behavioral data

As citizens increasingly encounter political information in digital environments, understanding whether this engagement shapes their policy views has become a central concern. Drawing on dual-process theories of persuasion, we argue that motivational activation is an enabling condition for policy support change in high-choice online environments. We test this in a three-wave field experiment with German participants (n = 791) across three policy topics (basic child support, renewable energy transition, cannabis legalization), in which participants were randomly assigned to a control group, and two encouragement conditions: a verbal encouragement, or a monetary incentive tied to a knowledge test. Browsing behavior was passively tracked via digital trace data over a 20-hour window. We find that self-directed online information search produced changes in policy support for child support and cannabis legalization but not for the energy transition, with monetary incentives producing significant effects rather than verbal prompts. We discuss motivational salience, issue malleability, and search-environment quality as joint conditions under which political information engagement can produce detectable changes in policy support.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Browsing behavior exposes identities on the Web

How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains are enough to identify 95% of the individuals. These digital fingerprints are stable and render high re-identifiability. We demonstrate that we can re-identify 80% of the individuals in separate time slices of data. Such a privacy threat persists even with limited information about individuals' browsing behavior, reinforcing existing concerns around online privacy.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Characteristics of ChatGPT users from Germany: implications for the digital divide from web tracking data

A major challenge of our time is reducing disparities in access to and effective use of digital technologies, with recent discussions highlighting the role of AI in exacerbating the digital divide. We examine user characteristics that predict usage of the AI-powered conversational agent ChatGPT. We combine behavioral and survey data in a web tracked sample of N = 1376 German citizens to investigate differences in ChatGPT activity (usage, visits, and adoption) during the first 11 months from the launch of the service (November 30, 2022). Guided by a model of technology acceptance (UTAUT-2), we examine the role of socio-demographics commonly associated with the digital divide in ChatGPT activity and explore further socio-political attributes identified via stability selection in Lasso regressions. We confirm that lower age and higher education affect ChatGPT usage, but do not find that gender or income do. We find full-time employment and more children to be barriers to ChatGPT activity. Using a variety of social media was positively associated with ChatGPT activity. In terms of political variables, political knowledge and political self-efficacy as well as some political behaviors such as voting, debating political issues online and offline and political action online were all associated with ChatGPT activity, with online political debating and political self-efficacy negatively so. Finally, need for cognition and communication skills such as writing, attending meetings, or giving presentations, were also associated with ChatGPT engagement, though chairing/organizing meetings was negatively associated. Our research informs efforts to address digital disparities and promote digital literacy among underserved populations by presenting implications, recommendations, and discussions on ethical and social issues of our findings.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Web Routineness and Limits of Predictability: Investigating Demographic and Behavioral Differences Using Web Tracking Data

Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and personalization. In this work, we demonstrate that people tend to follow routines on the Web, and these repetitive patterns of web visits increase their browsing behavior's achievable predictability. We present an information-theoretic framework for measuring the uncertainty and theoretical limits of predictability of human mobility on the Web. We systematically assess the impact of different design decisions on the measurement. We apply the framework to a web tracking dataset of German internet users. Our empirical results highlight that individual's routines on the Web make their browsing behavior predictable to 85% on average, though the value varies across individuals. We observe that these differences in the users' predictabilities can be explained to some extent by their demographic and behavioral attributes.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2013

Invariance and definability, with and without equality

The dual character of invariance under transformations and definability by some operations has been used in classical work by for example Galois and Klein. Following Tarski, philosophers of logic have claimed that logical notions themselves could be characterized in terms of invariance. In this paper, we generalize a correspondence due to Krasner between invariance under groups of permutations and definability in $\La_{\infty\infty}$ so as to cover the cases (quantifiers, logics without equality) that are of interest in the logicality debates, getting McGee's theorem about quantifiers invariant under all permutations and definability in pure $\La_{\infty\infty}$ as a particular case. We also prove some optimality results along the way, regarding the kind of relations which are needed so that every subgroup of the full permutation group is characterizable as a group of automorphisms.

math.LO↗

arXiv2005

No-counterexample interpretation et spécification des théorèmes de l'arithmétique

This paper presents two different ways of extracting the computational content of formal proofs in arithmetic. The first one corresponds to Kreisel's No-counterexample Interpretation. based on Ackermann consistency proof. We show the link with recent work by Krivine on classical realizability. Finally, we discuss the various degrees of modularity of both approaches.

math.LO↗