Related papers: A bistable belief dynamics model for radicalizatio…

The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…

At the beginning of a dynamic game, players may have exogenous theories about how the opponents are going to play. Suppose that these theories are commonly known. Then, players will refine their first-order beliefs, and challenge their own…

Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…

While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…

Localized wave fronts are a fundamental feature of biological systems from cell biology to ecology. Here, we study a broad class of bistable models subject to self-activation, degradation and spatially inhomogeneous activating agents. We…

Consequential decision-making typically incentivizes individuals to behave strategically, tailoring their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. A long line of work has therefore sought to counteract strategic behavior by designing…

We propose a model of binary opinion in which the opinion of the individuals change according to the state of their neighbouring domains. If the neighbouring domains have opposite opinions, then the opinion of the domain with the larger…

Many social interactions are group-based, yet their role in social polarization remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap here we introduce a higher-order framework that takes into account both group interactions and homophily. We find…

Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…

The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…

Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…

The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…

This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…

Due to unmeasured confounding, it is often not possible to identify causal effects from a postulated model. Nevertheless, we can ask for partial identification, which usually boils down to finding upper and lower bounds of a causal quantity…

Studying and understanding social networks is crucial for accurately defining ideological polarization, since they enable precise modeling of social structures. One of the limitations of many methods for quantifying polarization on networks…

Participants in longitudinal studies on the effects of drug treatment and criminal justice system interventions are at high risk for institutionalization (e.g., spending time in an environment where their freedom to use drugs, commit…

This paper studies a preference evolution model in which a population of agents are matched to play a sequential prisoner's dilemma in an incomplete information environment. An institution can design an incentive-compatible screening…

In sociological research, the study of macro processes, such as opinion polarization, faces a fundamental problem, the so-called micro-macro problem. To overcome this problem, we combine empirical experimental research on biased argument…

Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…

Deterrence coalitions that collectively own their deterrence technology, need an institutional design to decide when to retaliate against an attack or incident. This choice of institutional design, formalized through a social choice…