Related papers: Can Partisan Voting Lead to Truth?
Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…
In the voter and many other opinion formation models, agents are assumed to behave as congregators (also called the conformists); they are attracted to the opinions of others. In this study, I investigate linear extensions of the voter…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of…
We study a model for social influence in which the agents' opinion is a continuous variable [G. Weisbuch et al., Complexity \textbf{7}, 2, 55 (2002)]. The convergent opinion adjustment process takes place as a result of random binary…
The influence of contrarians on the noisy voter model is studied at the mean-field level. The noisy voter model is a variant of the voter model where agents can adopt two opinions, optimistic or pessimistic, and can change them by means of…
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…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to a plurality-vote counterpart. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population of voters in the initial state, it is found that having more available opinions in…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact…
Opinion formation is a process with strong implications for public policy. In controversial debates with large consequences, the public opinion is often trapped in a fifty-fifty stalemate, jeopardizing broadly accepted political decisions.…
We introduce a new opinion dynamics model where a group of agents holds two kinds of opinions: inherent and declared. Each agent's inherent opinion is fixed and unobservable by the other agents. At each time step, agents broadcast their…
In this article, we propose to use the formalism of quantum mechanics to describe and explain the so-called "abnormal" behaviour of agents in certain decision or choice contexts. The basic idea is to postulate that the preferences of these…
A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
We develop an overlapping generations model where each agent observes a verifiable private signal about the state and, with positive probability, also receives signals disclosed by his predecessor. The agent then takes an action and decides…
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…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…