Related papers: Quantifying the effects of social influence
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
The existence of juxtaposed regions of distinct cultures in spite of the fact that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as the individuals interact repeatedly is a puzzling phenomenon in the social…
In the setting where a group of agents is asked a single subjective multi-choice question (e.g. which one do you prefer? cat or dog?), we are interested in evaluating the quality of the collected feedback. However, the collected statistics…
A common assumption in the literature on information diffusion is that populations are homogeneous regarding individuals' information acquisition and propagation process: Individuals update their informed and actively communicating state…
Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these…
Cumulative effect in social contagions underlies many studies on the spread of innovation, behaviors, and influence. However, few large-scale empirical studies are conducted to validate the existence of cumulative effect in the information…
This paper proposes a belief-based framework for social norms in environments where individuals choose a single action. Relaxing the assumption that the appropriateness standard is common knowledge, the framework allows individuals to be…
This paper extends the concept of informative selection, population distribution and sample distribution to a spatial process context. These notions were first defined in a context where the output of the random process of interest consists…
The ability of groups to make accurate collective decisions depends on a complex interplay of various factors, such as prior information, biases, social influence, and the structure of the interaction network. Here, we investigate a spin…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…
We propose a probabilistic model to aggregate the answers of respondents answering multiple-choice questions. The model does not assume that everyone has access to the same information, and so does not assume that the consensus answer is…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
In this paper, we study the information propagation in an empirical blogging network by game-theoretical approach. The blogging network has small-world property and is scale-free. Individuals in the blogosphere coordinate their decisions…
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups,…
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…
Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…
The massive amounts of data that social media generates has facilitated the study of online human behavior on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. At the same time, the much discussed apparent randomness with which people interact online…