Related papers: Quantifying the effects of social influence
Predicting when an individual will adopt a new behavior is an important problem in application domains such as marketing and public health. This paper examines the perfor- mance of a wide variety of social network based measurements…
Whether, and under what conditions, groups exhibit "crowd wisdom" has been a major focus of research across the social and computational sciences. Much of this work has focused on the role of social influence in promoting the wisdom of the…
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…
Our opinions, which things we like or dislike, depend on the opinions of those around us. Nowadays, we are influenced by the opinions of online strangers, expressed in comments and ratings on online platforms. Here, we perform novel…
In our modern society, people are daily confronted with an increasing amount of information of any kind. As a consequence, the attention capacities and processing abilities of individuals often saturate. People, therefore, have to select…
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…
A fundamental feature for understanding the diffusion of innovations through a social group is the manner in which we are influenced by our own social interactions. It is usually assumed that only direct interactions, those that form our…
Collective intelligence, which aggregates the shared information from large crowds, is often negatively impacted by unreliable information sources with the low quality data. This becomes a barrier to the effective use of collective…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
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…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…
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…
A long-standing debate is whether social influence improves the collective wisdom of a crowd or undermines it. This paper addresses this question based on a naive learning setting in influence systems theory: in our models individuals…
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 provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
Natural and artificial collectives exhibit heterogeneities across different dimensions, contributing to the complexity of their behavior. We investigate the effect of two such heterogeneities on collective opinion dynamics: heterogeneity of…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural…