Related papers: The wisdom of the few: Predicting collective succe…
Understanding the collective dynamics behind the success of ideas, products, behaviors, and social actors is critical for decision-making across diverse contexts, including hiring, funding, career choices, and the design of interventions…
The use of information technology in the study of human behavior is a subject of great scientific interest. Cultural and personality aspects are factors that influence how people interact with one another in a crowd. This paper presents a…
Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…
Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the…
To choose restaurants and coffee shops, people are increasingly relying on social-networking sites. In a popular site such as Foursquare or Yelp, a place comes with descriptions and reviews, and with profile pictures of people who frequent…
Users increasing activity across various social networks made it the most widely used platform for exchanging and propagating information among individuals. To spread information within a network, a user initially shared information on a…
Many studies have shown that there are regularities in the way human beings make decisions. However, our ability to obtain models that capture such regularities and can accurately predict unobserved decisions is still limited. We tackle…
Technology development produces terabytes of data generated by hu- man activity in space and time. This enormous amount of data often called big data becomes crucial for delivering new insights to decision makers. It contains behavioral…
Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context,…
A success factor for modern companies in the age of Digital Marketing is to understand how customers think and behave based on their online shopping patterns. While the conventional method of gathering consumer insights through…
People can be characterized by their demographic information and personality traits. Characterizing people accurately can help predict their preferences, and aid recommendations and advertising. A growing number of studies infer people's…
By drawing on large-scale online data we construct and analyze the time-varying worldwide network of professional relationships among start-ups. The nodes of this network represent companies, while the links model the flow of employees and…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
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…
We consider the problem of selecting a minimum size subset of nodes in a network, that allows to activate all the nodes of the network. We present a fast and simple algorithm that, in real-life networks, produces solutions that outperform…
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…
Artificial intelligence is an emerging topic and will soon be able to perform decisions better than humans. In more complex and creative contexts such as innovation, however, the question remains whether machines are superior to humans.…
The rapid growth of e-commerce has made people accustomed to shopping online. Before making purchases on e-commerce websites, most consumers tend to rely on rating scores and review information to make purchase decisions. With this…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…