Scott Lee Chua 🇵🇭

papers

1. Cybercrime

   Measuring the deterioration of trust on the dark web: Evidence from Operation Bayonet

   S.L. Chua

   20th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (2021)
   Yale-NUS Outstanding Capstone in Economics (2020)

   Abstract PDF Slides Video

   How can we measure trust on illicit darknet market websites? Borrowing from the industrial organization literature, I propose a new empirical strategy that uses vendors’ return on reputation as a proxy for trust. I use this strategy to quantify the deterioration of trust on the Dream darknet market in response to Operation Bayonet, a law enforcement operation. I tease apart the effects of the operation’s first stage, a conventional market takedown, and its second stage, an impersonation campaign. I find that the latter significantly erodes marketplace trust while the former does not. This decrease in trust manifests as an increase in vendors’ returns on reputation. I estimate Operation Bayonet to have increased the difference in mean revenue between a 5-star and a 4-star vendor by 32.5 percentage points. I further find that deterioration in buyer trust concentrates darknet sales in the hands of fewer vendors, raising the barriers to entry and increasing the effectiveness of future anti-vendor law enforcement operations.

2. Dishonesty

   Lying behavior when the payoffs are shared with charity: Experimental evidence

   S.L. Chua, J. Chang, and G. Riambau

   Journal of Economic Psychology (2022)

   Abstract PDF Slides Code

   We investigate lying behavior when lying is undetectable and payoffs are split with charity. 524 participants roll a die in private, report the outcome, and receive the monetary equivalent of their reported number, i.e., there is a clear incentive to lie. Participants are randomly assigned to share all, some, or none of this payoff with a charity of their choice. This allows us to examine how lying behavior changes with the share of payoffs going to charity. Our results are as follows: (i) there are participants in every group who lie to inflate their reported number; (ii) participants with no share of the payoff lie much less than participants with some share, no matter how small; and (iii) post-experiment surveys reveal that participants who keep the whole payoff are much less likely to admit to having cheated than all other participants. Finally, our data suggests that lying is not correlated with any observable sociodemographic characteristic.

3. Science Fiction

   Reading Philippine science fiction through Science and Technology Studies: The Space Race and authoritarian modernity in Gregorio Brillantes’s “The Apollo Centennial”

   Ethan Chua and S.L. Chua

   Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (2023)

   Abstract PDF Video

   We propose that analyses of Philippine science fiction can meaningfully contribute to the growing intersections between Philippine studies and science and technology studies. We argue that science fiction is not only a literary genre but also a mode of inquiry into our notions of progress and modernity. Through this lens, we examine Gregorio Brillantes’s short story “The Apollo Centennial.” Set in a future where the Marcos regime never ended, “The Apollo Centennial” demonstrates how state infrastructural interventions can discipline Filipino subjects according to the dictates of an authoritarian techno-future. Nevertheless, the short story also gestures to the emancipatory potential of alternative linguistic and sensory modes through which state subjects might imagine other futures that defy narrative sequestration.

4. Education

   Do grades enhance learning? Evidence from a natural experiment in a liberal arts college

   S.L. Chua, G. Riambau, and T. Wertz

   60th Annual Meeting & Conference, Philippine Economic Society

   Slides