Related papers: Predictability in an unpredictable artificial cult…
In a prediction market, individuals can sequentially place bets on the outcome of a future event. This leaves a trail of personal probabilities for the event, each being conditional on the current individual's private background knowledge…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
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…
Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
Prediction markets are often used as mechanisms to aggregate information about a future event, for example, whether a candidate will win an election. The event is typically assumed to be exogenous. In reality, participants may influence the…
We consider a network of interacting agents and we model the process of choice on the adoption of a given innovative product by means of statistical-mechanics tools. The modelization allows us to focus on the effects of direct interactions…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
Why do some national music markets sustain a rich musical diversity whereas others converge on mostly formulaic output? The existing models of cultural consumption (superstar economics, rational addiction, Bayesian social learning) each…
The dynamics of individuals is of essential importance for understanding the evolution of social systems. Most existing models assume that individuals in diverse systems, ranging from social networks to e-commerce, all tend to what is…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Use of socially generated "big data" to access information about collective states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this would be the…
A prediction market is a useful means of aggregating information about a future event. To function, the market needs a trusted entity who will verify the true outcome in the end. Motivated by the recent introduction of decentralized…
Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…
Predictions about people, such as their expected educational achievement or their credit risk, can be performative and shape the outcome that they aim to predict. Understanding the causal effect of these predictions on the eventual outcomes…