Related papers: Can Partisan Voting Lead to Truth?
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
We investigate the problem of truth discovery based on opinions from multiple agents who may be unreliable or biased. We consider the case where agents' reliabilities or biases are correlated if they belong to the same community, which…
It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
We present a model of interacting multiple choices of opinions. At each step of the process, a listener is persuaded by his/her neighbour, the lobbyist, to modify his/her opinion on two different choices of event. Whether or not the…
We study a stochastic model of anonymous influence with conformist and anti-conformist individuals. Each agent with a `yes' or `no' initial opinion on a certain issue can change his opinion due to social influence. We consider anonymous…
In this paper, we consider the voter model with popularity bias. The influence of each node on its neighbors depends on its degree. We find the consensus probabilities and expected consensus times for each of the states. We also find the…
Consensus formation is investigated for multi-agent systems in which agents' beliefs are both vague and uncertain. Vagueness is represented by a third truth state meaning \emph{borderline}. This is combined with a probabilistic model of…
In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
We elicit incomplete preferences over monetary gambles with subjective uncertainty. Subjects rank gambles, and these rankings are used to estimate preferences; payments are based on estimated preferences. About 40\% of subjects express…
We propose an agent-based opinion formation model characterised by a two-fold novelty. First, we realistically assume that each agent cannot measure the opinion of its neighbours with infinite resolution and accuracy, and hence it can only…
A model for the joint evolution of opinions and how much the agents trust each other is presented. The model is built using the framework of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model. Instead of a fixed probability that the…
A "statistician" takes an action on behalf of an agent, based on the agent's self-reported personal data and a sample involving other people. The action that he takes is an estimated function of the agent's report. The estimation procedure…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
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.…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…