Related papers: Quantifying Filter Bubbles: Analyzing Surprise in …
In recent years, opinion dynamics has received an increasing attention, and various models have been introduced and evaluated mainly by simulation. In this study, we introduce and study a dynamical model inspired by the so-called `bounded…
Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…
This paper proposed a methodology to forecast electoral outcomes using the result of the combination of a fundamental model and a model-based aggregation of polls. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical structure for the fundamental model that…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
From a liberal perspective, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are seen as a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. Recently, there have been claims that viewpoint diversity is diminishing in online social networks, putting…
The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do business, but also the way we perform daily activities. In fact, the past Presidential elections in the United States as well as those in Great Britain (Brexit) and in…
The election forecasting 'industry' is a growing one, both in the volume of scholars producing forecasts and methodological diversity. In recent years a new approach has emerged that relies on social media and particularly Twitter data to…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
News recommender systems are used by online news providers to alleviate information overload and to provide personalized content to users. However, algorithmic news curation has been hypothesized to create filter bubbles and to intensify…
Recommender systems, which offer personalized suggestions to users, power many of today's social media, e-commerce and entertainment. However, these systems have been known to intellectually isolate users from a variety of perspectives, or…
Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of information and influence operations, as they allow a more effective disinformation's spread. Most studies on coordinated behaviors involved manual investigations, and the few existing…
We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatial model of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy preferences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voters' limited attention and how…
Information is transmitted through websites, and immediate reactions to various kinds of information are required. Hence, efforts by users to select information themselves have increased, which is fueling further improvements in…
Imagine a food recommender system -- how would we check if it is \emph{causing} and fostering unhealthy eating habits or merely reflecting users' interests? How much of a user's experience over time with a recommender is caused by the…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
The effect of user bias in fact-checking has not been explored extensively from a user-experience perspective. We estimate the user bias as a function of the user's perceived reputation of the news sources (e.g., a user with liberal beliefs…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…