Related papers: The Phantom Steering Effect in Q&A Websites
The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve…
Mobile crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale data sensing problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive mobile users. The mobile users will participate in a crowdsensing platform if they can receive…
Researchers have widely acknowledged the potential of control mechanisms with which end-users of recommender systems can better tailor recommendations. However, few e-learning environments so far incorporate such mechanisms, for example for…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
Recent research shows that humans are heavily influenced by online social interactions: We are more likely to perform actions which, in the past, have led to positive social feedback. We introduce a quantitative model of behavior changes in…
Social influence characterizes the change of an individual's stances in a complex social environment towards a topic. Two factors often govern the influence of stances in an online social network: endogenous influences driven by an…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research focuses on interactions between a single LM and a single…
The Internet has been ascribed a prominent role in collective action, particularly with widespread use of social media. But most mobilisations fail. We investigate the characteristics of those few mobilisations that succeed and hypothesise…
The structure of an online social network in most cases cannot be described just by links between its members. We study online social networks, in which members may have certain attitude, positive or negative toward each other, and so the…
Internet and online-based social systems are rising as the dominant mode of communication in society. However, the public or semi-private environment under which most online communications operate under do not make them suitable channels…
The deliberative potential of online platforms has been widely examined. However, little is known about how various interface-based reflection nudges impact the quality of deliberation. This paper presents two user studies with 12 and 120…
This paper considers stochastic bandits with side observations, a model that accounts for both the exploration/exploitation dilemma and relationships between arms. In this setting, after pulling an arm i, the decision maker also observes…
Most people consider their friends to be more positive than themselves, exhibiting a Sentiment Paradox. Psychology research attributes this paradox to human cognition bias. With the goal to understand this phenomenon, we study sentiment…
In the context of a voice assistant system, steering refers to the phenomenon in which a user issues a follow-up command attempting to direct or clarify a previous turn. We propose STEER, a steering detection model that predicts whether a…
Tagging facilitates information retrieval in social media and other online communities by allowing users to organize and describe online content. Researchers found that the efficiency of tagging systems steadily decreases over time, because…
For societies to produce or safeguard public goods, costly voluntary contributions are often required. From the perspective of each individual, however, it is advantageous not to volunteer such contributions, in the hope that other…
Increased data gathering capacity, together with the spread of data analytics techniques, has prompted an unprecedented concentration of information related to the individuals' preferences in the hands of a few gatekeepers. In the present…
This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of…
Activation steering -- adding a vector to a model's residual stream to modify its behavior -- is widely used in safety evaluations as if the model cannot detect the intervention. We test this assumption, introducing steering awareness: a…
Are rewards or penalties more effective in influencing user behavior? This work compares the effectiveness of subsidies and tolls in incentivizing user behavior in congestion games. The predominantly studied method of influencing user…