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In numerous physical models on networks, dynamics are based on interactions that exclusively involve properties of a node's nearest neighbors. However, a node's local view of its neighbors may systematically bias perceptions of network…
Cooperation is fundamental to the functioning of biological and social systems in both human and animal populations, with the structure of interactions playing a crucial role. Previous studies have used networks to describe interactions and…
Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…
Dynamic models and statistical inference for the diffusion of information in social networks is an area which has witnessed remarkable progress in the last decade due to the proliferation of social networks. Modeling and inference of…
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter permit experiments to be performed at minimal cost on populations of a size that scientists might previously have dreamt about. For instance, one experiment on Facebook involved over 60…
Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…
Prosocial behaviors are encountered in the donation game, the prisoner's dilemma, relaxed social dilemmas, and public goods games. Many studies assume that the population structure is homogeneous, meaning all individuals have the same…
The digital revolution has led to the digitization of human behavior, creating unprecedented opportunities to understand observable actions on an unmatched scale. Emerging phenomena such as crowdfunding and crowdsourcing have further…
Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated…
Current tests for contagion in social network studies are vulnerable to the confounding effects of latent homophily (i.e., ties form preferentially between individuals with similar hidden traits). We demonstrate a general method to lower…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Propensity Score Matching (PSM) stands as a widely embraced method in comparative effectiveness research. PSM crafts matched datasets, mimicking some attributes of randomized designs, from observational data. In a valid PSM design where all…
Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
We consider social learning where agents can only observe part of the population (modeled as neighbors on an undirected graph), face many decision problems, and arrival order of the agents is unknown. The central question we pose is whether…
We study treatment effect modifiers for causal analysis in a social network, where neighbors' characteristics or network structure may affect the outcome of a unit, and the goal is to identify sub-populations with varying treatment effects…
We consider the problem of estimating social influence, the effect that a person's behavior has on the future behavior of their peers. The key challenge is that shared behavior between friends could be equally explained by influence or by…
Longitudinal data tracking repeated measurements on individuals are highly valued for research because they offer controls for unmeasured individual heterogeneity that might otherwise bias results. Random effects or mixed models approaches,…
In-depth studies of sociotechnical systems are largely limited to single instances. Network surveys are expensive, and platforms vary in important ways, from interface design, to social norms, to historical contingencies. With single…