Related papers: What do leaders know?
We investigate the phenomenon of diffusion in a countably infinite society of individuals interacting with their neighbors in a network. At a given time, each individual is either active or inactive. The diffusion is driven by two…
Adaptation to dynamic conditions requires a certain degree of diversity. If all agents take the best current action, learning that the underlying state has changed and behavior should adapt will be slower. Diversity is harder to maintain…
Information is a critical dimension in warfare. Inaccurate information such as misinformation or disinformation further complicates military operations. In this paper, we examine the value of misinformation and disinformation to a military…
An asymmetric information model is introduced for the situation in which there is a small agent who is more susceptible to the flow of information in the market than the general market participant, and who tries to implement strategies…
How an information spreads throughout a social network is a valuable knowledge sought by many groups such as marketing enterprises and political parties. If they can somehow predict the impact of a given message or manipulate it in order to…
Reputation is a central element of social communications, be it with human or artificial intelligence (AI), and as such can be the primary target of malicious communication strategies. There is already a vast amount of literature on trust…
The minority model was introduced to study the competition between agents with limited information. It has the remarkable feature that, as the amount of information available increases, the collective gain made by the agents is reduced.…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
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…
The spread of new ideas, behaviors or technologies has been extensively studied using epidemic models. Here we consider a model of diffusion where the individuals' behavior is the result of a strategic choice. We study a simple coordination…
We develop a model of social learning from overabundant information: Short-lived agents sequentially choose from a large set of (flexibly correlated) information sources for prediction of an unknown state. Signal realizations are public. We…
Some political strategies to win elections over the last years were based heavily on fomenting general distrust in information institutions and favoring distrustful sources. The misinformation pandemic has the straightforward consequence…
The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [2020]…
Barring swarm robotics, a substantial share of current machine-human and machine-machine learning and interaction mechanisms are being developed and fed by results of agent-based computer simulations, game-theoretic models, or robotic…
It is well known that sequential decision making may lead to information cascades. That is, when agents make decisions based on their private information, as well as observing the actions of those before them, then it might be rational to…
We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of…