Related papers: Discrete Choices under Social Influence: Generic P…
Despite strong evidence for peer effects, little is known about how individuals balance intrinsic preferences and social learning in different choice environments. Using a combination of experiments and discrete choice modeling, we show…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
We investigate, through a kinetic-exchange model, the impact that an external field, like advertising and propaganda, has on opinion dynamics. We address the situations where two opposite alternatives can be selected but the possibility of…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
We investigate the effects of external and autonomous global interaction fields on an adaptive network of social agents with an opinion formation dynamics based on a simple imitation rule. We study the competition between global fields and…
The ability of groups to make accurate collective decisions depends on a complex interplay of various factors, such as prior information, biases, social influence, and the structure of the interaction network. Here, we investigate a spin…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Users of social networks display diversified behavior and online habits. For instance, a user's tendency to reply to a post can depend on the user and the person posting. For convenience, we group users into aggregated behavioral patterns,…
We study unit-level expenditure on consumption across multiple countries and multiple years, in order to extract invariant features of consumption distribution. We show that the bulk of it is lognormally distributed, followed by a power law…
In this paper we propose a finite-dimensional and deterministic approach to the study of invariant sets of certain nonautonomous differential inclusions naturally arising in the context of random and control dynamical systems, as well as in…
We study properties of some standard network models when the population is split into two types and the connection pattern between the types is varied. The studied models are generalizations of the Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi graph, the…
Three theories offer competing predictions about how people respond to growing diversity in their social environment. Contact theory suggests more exposure to out-groups reduces prejudice; conflict theory predicts a stronger in-group…
Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
Many products and innovations become well-known and widely adopted through the social interactions of individuals in a population. The Bass diffusion model has been widely used to model the temporal evolution of adoption in such social…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
Idiosyncratic tendency to choose one alternative over others in the absence of an identified reason, is a common observation in two-alternative forced-choice experiments. It is tempting to account for it as resulting from the (unknown)…
Participatory budgeting (PB) has attracted much attention in recent times due to its wide applicability in social choice settings. In this paper, we consider indivisible PB which involves allocating an available, limited budget to a set of…
We provide a framework for modeling social network formation through conditional multinomial logit models from discrete choice and random utility theory, in which each new edge is viewed as a "choice" made by a node to connect to another…
Probabilistic independence can dramatically simplify the task of eliciting, representing, and computing with probabilities in large domains. A key technique in achieving these benefits is the idea of graphical modeling. We survey existing…