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In mainstream neoclassical economics, utility maximization is the only engine of individual action, and the other or the social, if it is modeled for decisions deemed fundamental, it is done as a tacit externality parameter affecting an…
Group recommender systems facilitate group decision making for a set of individuals (e.g., a group of friends, a team, a corporation, etc.). Many of these systems, however, either assume that (i) user preferences can be elicited (or…
People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act…
Increasingly, people use social media for their day-to-day interactions and as a source of information, even though much of this information is practically anonymous. This raises the question: does anonymous information influence its…
Recommender systems help people find relevant content in a personalized way. One main promise of such systems is that they are able to increase the visibility of items in the long tail, i.e., the lesser-known items in a catalogue. Existing…
Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…
Social influence characterizes the change of an individual's stances in a complex social environment towards a topic. Two factors often govern the influence of stances in an online social network: endogenous influences driven by an…
Voting online with explicit ratings could largely reflect people's preferences and objects' qualities, but ratings are always irrational, because they may be affected by many unpredictable factors like mood, weather, as well as other…
Recommender systems are indispensable because they influence our day-to-day behavior and decisions by giving us personalized suggestions. Services like Kindle, Youtube, and Netflix depend heavily on the performance of their recommender…
We investigate whether risk and time preferences differ when individuals make decisions for others compared to making decisions for themselves. We introduce a novel ``skin in the game'' experimental design, where choices for others incur a…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research…
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…
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…
Top-N recommendation, which aims to learn user ranking-based preference, has long been a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications. Traditional models usually motivate themselves by designing complex or tailored architectures…
We study an opinion formation model that takes into account that individuals have diverse preferences when forming their opinion regarding a particular issue. We show that the system exhibits a phenomenon called "diversity-induced…
Decisions by humans depend on their estimations given some uncertain sensory data. These decisions can also be influenced by the behavior of others. Here we present a mathematical model to quantify this influence, inviting a further study…
Many social networks in our daily life are bipartite networks built on reciprocity. How can we recommend users/friends to a user, so that the user is interested in and attractive to recommended users? In this research, we propose a new…