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In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
This paper considers online reputation and polling systems where individuals make recommendations based on their private observations and recommendations of friends. Such interaction of individuals and their social influence is modelled as…
Crowdsourcing can identify high-quality solutions to problems; however, individual decisions are constrained by cognitive biases. We investigate some of these biases in an experimental model of a question-answering system. In both natural…
Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach…
Crowdsourcing has been widely used to efficiently obtain labeled datasets for supervised learning from large numbers of human resources at low cost. However, one of the technical challenges in obtaining high-quality results from…
Discovering the antecedents of individuals' influence in collaborative environments is an important, practical, and challenging problem. In this paper, we study interpersonal influence in small groups of individuals who collectively execute…
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups,…
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…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
We study the role of hierarchical structures in a simple model of collective consensus formation based on the bounded confidence model with continuous individual opinions. For the particular variation of this model considered in this paper,…
In this big data era, more and more social activities are digitized thereby becoming traceable, and thus the studies of social networks attract increasing attention from academia. It is widely believed that social networks play important…
Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
Algorithms deployed in education can shape the learning experience and success of a student. It is therefore important to understand whether and how such algorithms might create inequalities or amplify existing biases. In this paper, we…
The provision of information can improve individual judgments but also fail to make group decisions more accurate; if individuals choose to attend to the same information in the same manner, the predictive diversity that enables crowd…
It has been proposed that information sharing, which is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior, plays a critical role in cultivating and maintaining a sense of shared reality. Across three studies, we tested this theory by investigating…
Being able to correctly aggregate the beliefs of many people into a single belief is a problem fundamental to many important social, economic and political processes such as policy making, market pricing and voting. Although there exist…
People's collectively shared beliefs can have significant social implications, including on democratic processes and policies. Unfortunately, as people interact with peers to form and update their beliefs, various cognitive and social…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…