Related papers: A Model of Presidential Debates
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the…
We study candidates' positioning when adjustments are possible in response to new information about voters' preferences. Re-positioning allows candidates to get closer to the median voter but is costly both financially and electorally. We…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
We study a regime change game in which the state and an opposition leader both observe the regime's true strength and may engage in costly communication by manipulating the mean of citizens' private signals. Each citizen then decides…
In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
Argumentation accommodates various rhetorical devices, such as questions, reported speech, and imperatives. These rhetorical tools usually assert argumentatively relevant propositions rather implicitly, so understanding their true meaning…
We examine probabilistic forecasts for battleground states in the 2020 US presidential election, using daily data from two sources over seven months: a model published by The Economist, and prices from the PredictIt exchange. We find…
While multi-agent debate has been proposed as a promising strategy for improving AI reasoning ability, we find that debate can sometimes be harmful rather than helpful. Prior work has primarily focused on debates within homogeneous groups…
Despite theoretical promise, debate as a scalable oversight protocol has produced mixed empirical results: gains in some settings, and null effects in others, especially when the judge does not have information hidden from it. We study…
Political and advertising campaigns increasingly exploit social networks to spread information and persuade people. This paper studies a persuasion model to examine whether such a strategy is better than simply sending public signals.…
Models of auctions or tendering processes are introduced. In every round of bidding the players select their bid from a probability distribution and whenever a bid is unsuccessful, it is discarded and replaced. For simple models, the…
In the persuasion model, apart from a few special cases, comparative statics has been an open question. We answer it, delineating which shifts of the sender's interim payoff lead her optimally to choose a more informative signal. Our first…
We study an opinion dynamics model in which agents reach compromise via pairwise interactions. When the opinions of two agents are sufficiently close, they both acquire the average of their initial opinions; otherwise, they do not interact.…
The electoral criterion of independence of irrelevant alternatives, or IIA, states that a voting system is unacceptable if it would choose a different winner if votes were recounted after one of the losers had dropped out. But IIA confuses…
Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data where nobody can claim absolute certainty, due to current state of scientific knowledge, are studied. The cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza are…