Related papers: Measuring and Optimizing Cultural Markets
Uncertainty visualizations often emphasize point estimates to support magnitude estimates or decisions through visual comparison. However, when design choices emphasize means, users may overlook uncertainty information and misinterpret…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
A dynamical model is introduced for the formation of a bullish or bearish trends driving an asset price in a given market. Initially, each agent decides to buy or sell according to its personal opinion, which results from the combination of…
In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…
The typical algorithmic problem in viral marketing aims to identify a set of influential users in a social network, who, when convinced to adopt a product, shall influence other users in the network and trigger a large cascade of adoptions.…
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…
Influence maximization is the problem of finding a set of users in a social network, such that by targeting this set, one maximizes the expected spread of influence in the network. Most of the literature on this topic has focused…
Social media (SM) data provides a vast record of humanity's everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions at a resolution previously unimaginable. Because user behavior on SM is a reflection of events in the real world, researchers have realized…
Social networks are commonly used for marketing purposes. For example, free samples of a product can be given to a few influential social network users (or "seed nodes"), with the hope that they will convince their friends to buy it. One…
Real-world recommender systems often need to balance multiple objectives when deciding which recommendations to present to users. These include behavioural signals (e.g. clicks, shares, dwell time), as well as broader objectives (e.g.…
Being able to assess the impact of government-led investment onto socio-economic indicators in cities has long been an important target of urban planning. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with a fine spatio-temporal resolution,…
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…
In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…
Much work in Social Network Analysis has focused on the identification of the most important actors in a social network. This has resulted in several measures of influence and authority. While most of such sociometrics (e.g., PageRank) are…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…