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The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community generated trust and reputation…
Increasing energy efficiency in buildings can reduce costs and emissions substantially. Historically, this has been treated as a local, or single-agent, optimization problem. However, many buildings utilize the same types of thermal…
We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…
We propose a continuous-time nonlinear model of opinion dynamics with utility-maximizing agents connected via a social influence network. A distinguishing feature of the proposed model is the inclusion of an opinion-dependent…
We introduce a utility-driven bounded-confidence model of opinion dynamics in which opinions associated with higher utility exert stronger social influence. In the regime where all agents belong to a single opinion cluster, we derive a…
We consider a network of interacting agents and we model the process of choice on the adoption of a given innovative product by means of statistical-mechanics tools. The modelization allows us to focus on the effects of direct interactions…
Social rewards shape human behavior. During development, a caregiver guides a learner's behavior towards culturally aligned goals and values. How do these behaviors persist and generalize when the caregiver is no longer present, and the…
Negative affect is a proxy for mental health in adults. By being able to predict participants' negative affect states unobtrusively, researchers and clinicians will be better positioned to deliver targeted, just-in-time mental health…
Reducing the peak energy consumption of households is essential for the effective use of renewable energy sources, in order to ensure that as much household demand as possible can be met by renewable sources. This entails spreading out the…
Twelve years ago, the European Union began with the gradual phase-out of energy-inefficient incandescent light bulbs under the Ecodesign Directive. In this work, we implement an agent-based simulation to model the consumer behaviour in the…
In non-network settings, encouragement designs have been widely used to analyze causal effects of a treatment, policy, or intervention on an outcome of interest when randomizing the treatment was considered impractical or when compliance to…
The wisdom of crowds has been shown to operate not only for factual judgments but also in matters of taste, where accuracy is defined relative to an individual's preferences. However, it remains unclear how different types of social signals…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
Members of social networks are given opportunities to bestow positive recognition upon one another by means of constructs such as "likes" and "retweets." Although recipients no doubt experience utility from these actions, one might question…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
The concept of privacy is inherently intertwined with human attitudes and behaviours, as most computer systems are primarily designed for human use. Especially in the case of Recommender Systems, which feed on information provided by…
Virtual agents are commonly used in physical activity interventions to support behavior change, often taking the role of coaches that deliver encouragement and feedback. While effective for compliance, this role typically lacks relational…
Social robots are increasingly recognized as valuable supporters in the field of well-being coaching. They can function as independent coaches or provide support alongside human coaches, and healthcare professionals. In coaching…
Many online platforms incorporate engagement signals, such as likes, into their interface design to boost engagement. However, these signals can unintentionally elevate content that may not support normatively desirable behavior, especially…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…