Related papers: Assessing differences in legislators' revealed pre…
This paper formalizes the lattice structure of the ballot voters cast in a ranked-choice election and the preferences that this structure induces. These preferences are shown to be counter to previous assumptions about the preferences of…
Previous research indicates that race, ethnicity, and gender influence legislative behavior in important ways. The bulk of this research, however, focuses on the way these characteristics shape an individual legislator's behavior, making it…
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…
Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in…
There are many entities that disseminate in the physical space - information, gossip, mood, innovation etc. Personal spaces are also entities that disperse and interplay. In this work we study the emergence of configurations formed by…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…
Understanding and predicting human migration patterns is a central challenge in population dynamics research. Traditional physics-inspired gravity and radiation models represent migration flows as functions of attractiveness using…
It has been observed people tend to have opinions that are far more internally consistent than it would be reasonable to expect. Here, we study how that observation might emerge from changing how agents trust the opinions of their peers in…
Can stated preferences help in counterfactual analyses of actual choice? This research proposes a novel approach to researchers who have access to both stated choices in hypothetical scenarios and actual choices. The key idea is to use…
This paper investigates Bayesian variable selection when there is a hierarchical dependence structure on the inclusion of predictors in the model. In particular, we study the type of dependence found in polynomial response surfaces of…
Inspired by the spread of discontent as in the 2016 presidential election, we consider a voter model in which 0's are ordinary voters and 1's are zealots. Thinking of a social network, but desiring the simplicity of an infinite object that…
With the widespread use of mobile phones, users can share their location anytime, anywhere, as a form of check-in data. These data reflect user preferences. Furthermore, the preference rules for different users vary. How to discover a…
We propose a framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about the preferences of other voters, or about other voters' knowledge about her own preference. In this setting we define notions of manipulation, equilibrium,…
The estimation of voting blocs is an important statistical inquiry in political science. However, the scope of these analyses is usually restricted to roll call data where individual votes are directly observed. Here, we examine a Bayesian…
Label bias occurs when the outcome of interest is not directly observable and instead, modeling is performed with proxy labels. When the difference between the true outcome and the proxy label is correlated with predictors, this can yield…
We study the role of hierarchical structures in a simple model of collective consensus formation based on the bounded confidence model with continuous individual opinions. For the particular variation of this model considered in this paper,…
We investigate peer role model influence on successful graduation from Therapeutic Communities (TCs) for substance abuse and criminal behavior. We use data from 3 TCs that kept records of exchanges of affirmations among residents and their…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising accuracy in predicting survey responses and policy preferences, which has increased interest in their potential to represent human interests in various domains. Most existing research has…
As large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in digital platforms and decision-making systems, concerns about their political biases have grown. While substantial work has examined social biases such as gender and race, systematic…
Students express a wide range of preferences for learning environments. We are trying to measure the manifestation of learning styles in various learning environments. In particular, we are interested in performance in an environment that…