Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij | Ph.D.

Kristoffer
Ahlstrom-Vij
, PhD

 
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ABOUT ME

I’m currently Head of Analytics, EMEA at Featurespace. Before joining Featurespace, I was a quantitative social scientist and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, as well as Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and Research Associate at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). 

A lot of my work concerned the relationship between knowledge and preferences, with a particular interest in political preferences. For a flavour of my work, here is a video of me talking about why you should take the ‘political genius pill’ (if the video doesn’t appear below, click here):

More generally, I worked on three broad topics, as follows:

  • POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

    • I’ve explored the problems posed for democracy by public ignorance (see here and here), the pitfalls of social deliberation in democratic decision making, and how to address these challenges by determining electoral outcomes through models of fully informed preferences, which raises interesting questions about both political legitimacy.

    • I’ve also explored how such models can be implemented online for people wondering what political positions they likely would have taken, had they been able to keep abreast of the constant stream of political developments—which is what US voters voters now can find out on my website If Informed.

    • I also released the ‘informationeffectsR package that makes it easy to estimate information effects, i.e., differences between actual and fully informed preferences, on standard political attitudes surveys. A full vignette for the package can be found here.

    • I’ve looked at how people process evidence of the economic impact of immigration together with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

  • PREDICTION MARKETS AND SOCIAL-CIRCLE SURVEYS

    • I’ve done experimental work on self-resolving information markets showing that such markets can be made to match traditional markets in accuracy, without relying on external events in settling pay-offs.

    • I’ve also explored why prediction markets tend to outperform traditional polls by investigating the relationship between the former and s0-called social-circle surveys, which also tend to be highly predictive.

  • EPISTEMIC CONSEQUENTIALISM

    • In a couple of publications, I’ve defended epistemic consequentialism (see here and here) as part of a join project with Jeff Dunn (DePauw), originally funded by the British Academy.

    • As part of the project, Jeff and I also edited a volume on epistemic consequentialism for Oxford University Press.

For more on my past research projects, see my research projects page.