Related papers: Finite-time influence systems and the Wisdom of Cr…
Designing feasible control strategies for opinion dynamics in complex social systems has never been an easy task. It requires a control protocol which 1) is not enforced on all individuals in the society, and 2) does not exclusively rely on…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
We explore a model of non-Bayesian information aggregation in networks. Agents non-cooperatively choose among Friedkin-Johnsen type aggregation rules to maximize payoffs. The DeGroot rule is chosen in equilibrium if and only if there is…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…
In the age of technology, individuals accelerate their biased gathering of information which in turn leads to a population becoming extreme and more polarized. Here we study a partial differential equation model for opinion dynamics that…
In this paper, we present a novel model to characterize individual tendencies in repeated decision-making scenarios, with the goal of designing model-based control strategies that promote virtuous choices amidst social and external…
In 1907, Sir Francis Galton independently asked 787 villagers to estimate the weight of an ox. Although none of them guessed the exact weight, the average estimate was remarkably accurate. This phenomenon is known as wisdom of crowds. In a…
We study the process of opinion formation in an Ising social network of scientific collaborations. The network is undirected. An Ising spin is associated with each network node being oriented up (red) or down (blue). Certain nodes carry…
We study opinion dynamics in a social network with stubborn agents who influence their neighbors but who themselves always stick to their initial opinion. We consider first the well-known DeGroot model. While it is known in the literature…
Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…
What is the effect of the combined direct and indirect social influences-peer pressure (PP)-on a social groups collective decisions? We present a model that captures PP as a function of the socio-cultural distance between individuals in a…
We explore the possibilities of enforcing and preventing consensus in continuous opinion dynamics that result from modifications in the communication rules. We refer to the model of Weisbuch and Deffuant, where $n$ agents adjust their…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
We show how the quality of decisions based on the aggregated opinions of the crowd can be conveniently studied using a sample of individual responses to a standard IQ questionnaire. We aggregated the responses to the IQ questionnaire using…
Influence functions approximate the effect of training samples in test-time predictions and have a wide variety of applications in machine learning interpretability and uncertainty estimation. A commonly-used (first-order) influence…
The DeGroot model of naive social learning assumes that agents only communicate scalar opinions. In practice, agents communicate not only their opinions, but their confidence in such opinions. We propose a model that captures this aspect of…
The interest in the wisdom of crowds stems mainly from the possibility of combining independent forecasts from experts in the hope that many expert minds are better than a few. Hence the relevant subject of study nowadays is the Vox…
We study the strategic aspects of social influence in a society of agents linked by a trust network, introducing a new class of games called games of influence. A game of influence is an infinite repeated game with incomplete information in…
The bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics, introduced by Deffuant et al, is a stochastic model for the evolution of continuous-valued opinions within a finite group of peers. We prove that, as time goes to infinity, the opinions…