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Data-centric technologies provide exciting opportunities, but recent research has shown how lack of representation in datasets, often as a result of systemic inequities and socioeconomic disparities, can produce inequitable outcomes that…
Beauty standards shape self-perception and health through social comparison and objectification, while exposure to idealized imagery exacerbates body-image concerns. Media and fashion are central arbiters of these ideals, yet long-term,…
This work studies the impact of economic inequality on the evolution of intolerance through a reputation-based model of indirect reciprocity. Results show that economic inequality is a powerful enhancer of intolerance, inducing the…
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…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
Income inequality is a distributional phenomenon. This paper examines the impact of U.S governor's party allegiance (Republican vs Democrat) on ethnic wage gap. A descriptive analysis of the distribution of yearly earnings of Whites and…
This paper highlights the size-dependency of income distributions, i.e. the income distribution curves versus the population of a country systematically. By using the generalized Lotka-Volterra model to fit the empirical income data in the…
Empirical analyses on the factors driving vote switching are rare, usually conducted at the national level without considering the parties of origin and destination, and often unreliable due to the severe inaccuracy of recall survey data.…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
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,…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
What is the effect of the combined direct and indirect social influences-peer pressure (PP)-on a social groups collective decisions? We present a model that captures PP as a function of the socio-cultural distance between individuals in a…
Modern models for common NLP tasks often employ machine learning techniques and train on journalistic, social media, or other culturally-derived text. These have recently been scrutinized for racial and gender biases, rooting from inherent…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…