Related papers: Free Information Flow Benefits Truth Seeking
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a…
Is more novel research always desirable? We develop a model in which knowledge shapes society's policies and guides the search for discoveries. Researchers select a question and how intensely to study it. The novelty of a question…
Epistemic social choice aims at unveiling a hidden ground truth given votes, which are interpreted as noisy signals about it. We consider here a simple setting where votes consist of approval ballots: each voter approves a set of…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
Noise is often used in the study of open systems, such as in classical Brownian motion and in Quantum Dynamics, to model the influence of the environment. However generalising results from G\"{o}del and Chaitin in mathematics suggests that…
Living in the 'Information Age' means that not only access to information has become easier but also that the distribution of information is more dynamic than ever. Through a large-scale online field experiment, we provide new empirical…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
We introduce a model of persuasion in which a sender without any commitment power privately gathers information about an unknown state of the world and then chooses what to verifiably disclose to a receiver. The receiver does not know how…
Belief perseverance is the widely documented tendency of holding to a belief, even in the presence of contradicting evidence. In online environments, this tendency leads to heated arguments with users ``blocking'' each other. Introducing…
We present a measurement noise reduction scheme based on information flow of a chaotic system. This scheme operates on conditions of chaoticity and well-defined noise level, not depending on other detailed characteristics of noise. Starting…
Recent literature highlights the advantages of implementing social rules via dynamic game forms. We characterize when truth-telling remains a dominant strategy in gradual mechanisms implementing strategy-proof social rules, where agents…
Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…
We examine the effect of noise on societies of agents using an agent-based model of evolutionary norm emergence. Generally, we see that noisy societies are more selfish, smaller and discontent, and are caught in rounds of perpetual…
The volume and velocity of information that gets generated online limits current journalistic practices to fact-check claims at the same rate. Computational approaches for fact checking may be the key to help mitigate the risks of massive…
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
The explosive growth in fake news and its erosion to democracy, justice, and public trust has increased the demand for fake news detection and intervention. This survey reviews and evaluates methods that can detect fake news from four…
The emergence of research focused to understand the spreading and impact of disinformation is increasing year over year. Most times, the purpose of those who start the spreading of information intentionally false and designed to cause harm…
We introduce a theoretical model of information acquisition under resource limitations in a noisy environment. An agent must guess the truth value of a given Boolean formula $\varphi$ after performing a bounded number of noisy tests of the…