Related papers: Effects of Social Influence on the Wisdom of Crowd…
The wisdom of crowds has been shown to operate not only for factual judgments but also in matters of taste, where accuracy is defined relative to an individual's preferences. However, it remains unclear how different types of social signals…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
We consider the problem of estimating social influence, the effect that a person's behavior has on the future behavior of their peers. The key challenge is that shared behavior between friends could be equally explained by influence or by…
We investigate opinion spreading by a threshold model in a situation where the influence of people is heterogeneously distributed. We focus on the response of the average opinion as a function between the trend between out-degree (number of…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be…
Research on belief formation has produced contradictory findings on whether and when communication between group members will improve the accuracy of numeric estimates such as economic forecasts, medical diagnoses, and job candidate…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
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…
We consider a discrete opinion formation problem in a setting where agents are influenced by both information diffused by their social relations and from recommendations received directly from the social media manager. We study how the…
With the increasing pervasiveness of algorithms across industry and government, a growing body of work has grappled with how to understand their societal impact and ethical implications. Various methods have been used at different stages of…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
The average portfolio structure of institutional investors is shown to have properties which account for transaction costs in an optimal way. This implies that financial institutions unknowingly display collective rationality, or Wisdom of…
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…
Social media comprises interactive applications and platforms for creating, sharing and exchange of user-generated contents. The past ten years have brought huge growth in social media, especially online social networking services, and it…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
We study the effects of inhomogeneous influence of individuals on collective phenomena. We focus analytically on a typical model of the majority rule, applied to the completely connected agents. Two types of individuals $A$ and $B$ with…
Future Event Prediction (FEP) is an essential activity whose demand and application range across multiple domains. While traditional methods like simulations, predictive and time-series forecasting have demonstrated promising outcomes,…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
The diffusion of information and behaviors over social networks is of considerable interest in research fields ranging from sociology to computer science and application domains such as marketing, finance, human health, and national…