Related papers: Predictability in an unpredictable artificial cult…
We present a graph-theoretic model of consumer choice, where final decisions are shown to be influenced by information and knowledge, in the form of individual awareness, discriminating ability, and perception of market structure. Building…
Prediction markets are widely treated as forecasting devices that reveal collective expectations about uncertain futures. This article argues that under specifiable conditions they also function as coordination mechanisms: public…
Applications from finance to epidemiology and cyber-security require accurate forecasts of dynamic phenomena, which are often only partially observed. We demonstrate that a system's predictability degrades as a function of temporal…
A dataset has been classified by some unknown classifier into two types of points. What were the most important factors in determining the classification outcome? In this work, we employ an axiomatic approach in order to uniquely…
Automated decision systems are increasingly used for consequential decision making -- for a variety of reasons. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque models, which do not (or hardly) allow for understanding how or why a given…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
In a world where ideas flow freely between people across multiple platforms, we often find ourselves relying on others' information without an objective standard to judge whether those opinions are accurate. The present study tests an…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
Predicting the future popularity of online content is highly important in many applications. Preferential attachment phenomena is encountered in scale free networks.Under it's influece popular items get more popular thereby resulting in…
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…
Bayesian persuasion, a central model in information design, studies how a sender, who privately observes a state drawn from a prior distribution, strategically sends a signal to influence a receiver's action. A key assumption is that both…
Home entertainment systems feature in a variety of usage scenarios with one or more simultaneous users, for whom the complexity of choosing media to consume has increased rapidly over the last decade. Users' decision processes are complex…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
Large-scale datasets are increasingly being used to inform decision making. While this effort aims to ground policy in real-world evidence, challenges have arisen as selection bias and other forms of distribution shifts often plague…
We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…
We initiate the study of the effects of non-transparency in decision rules on individuals' ability to improve in strategic learning settings. Inspired by real-life settings, such as loan approvals and college admissions, we remove the…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Predictive models for identifying at-risk students early can help teaching staff direct resources to better support them, but there is a growing concern about the fairness of algorithmic systems in education. Predictive models may…
The ability to predict social interactions between people has profound applications including targeted marketing and prediction of information diffusion and disease propagation. Previous work has shown that the location of an individual at…
Abstraction and realization are bilateral processes that are key in deriving intelligence and creativity. In many domains, the two processes are approached through rules: high-level principles that reveal invariances within similar yet…