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Minimizing social bias strengthens societal bonds, promoting shared understanding and better decision-making. We revisit the definition of bias by discovering new bias types (e.g., societal status) in dynamic environments and describe them…

What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…

Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal have played a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. These good actions may not maximise the actor's payoff, but they maximise the other's payoff.…

Social marketing is becoming increasingly important in contemporary business. Central to social marketing is quantifying how consumers choose between alternatives and how they influence each other. This work considers a new but simple…

In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…

Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from single-user assistants to active participants in civic and workplace deliberation, evaluating their effects on collective decision making becomes a governance challenge. We present two empirical…

We investigate, at the fundamental level, the questions of `why', `when' and `how' one could or should reach out to poor and vulnerable people to support them in the absence of governmental institutions. We provide a simple and new approach…

Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…

Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should…

From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…

Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different…

In a context where a decision has to be taken collectively by several agents, the social choice problem consists in deciding whether there exists a socially acceptable rule that aggregates the individual preferences of the agents into a…

We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…

An important objective in the development of targeted therapies is to identify the populations where the treatment under consideration has positive benefit risk balance. We consider pivotal clinical trials, where the efficacy of a treatment…

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is…

Altruism is fundamental to human societies, fostering cooperation and social cohesion. Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) can display human-like prosocial behavior, but the internal computations that produce such…

Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. Here we report…

Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…

Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization…