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Imitation learning practitioners have often noted that conditioning policies on previous actions leads to a dramatic divergence between "held out" error and performance of the learner in situ. Interactive approaches can provably address…
The explosive growth of online misinformation, such as false claims, has affected the social behavior of online users. In order to be persuasive and mislead the audience, false claims are made to trigger emotions in their audience. This…
Epidemiological models increasingly rely on self-reported behavioral data such as vaccination status, mask usage, and social distancing adherence to forecast disease transmission and assess the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions…
A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
A novel coronavirus disease has emerged (later named COVID-19) and caused the world to enter a new reality, with many direct and indirect factors influencing it. Some are human-controllable (e.g. interventional policies, mobility and the…
Design/methodology/approach We compared the awareness of 813 people in Wuhan city from January to March 2023 (Wuhan 2023) and 2,973 people in East and South China from February to May 2020 (China 2020) using responses to questionnaires…
We propose a new method that uses tensor completion to estimate causal effects with multivariate longitudinal data, data in which multiple outcomes are observed for each unit and time period. Our motivation is to estimate the number of…
Many governments have managed to control their COVID-19 outbreak with a simple message: keep the effective '$R$ number' $R<1$ to prevent widespread contagion and flatten the curve. This raises the question whether a similar policy could…
Pursuit of honest and truthful decision-making is crucial for governance and accountability in democracies. However, people sometimes take different perspectives of what it means to be honest and how to pursue truthfulness. Here we explore…
Human interactions are mediated by social influence. During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, social influence determines whether life-saving information is adopted or immunization campaigns meet their targets. The literature on online…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter. Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i) tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii) COVID-19…
We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents of their 'in-group' and, in addition, they…
Simulation models have been informing the COVID-19 policy-making process. These models, therefore, have significant influence on risk of societal harms. But how clearly are the underlying modelling assumptions and limitations communicated…
One of the main dimensions characterizing the unfolding of opinion formation processes in social debates is the degree of open-mindedness of the involved population. Opinion dynamic modeling studies have tried to capture such a peculiar…
Misinformation is an important topic in the Information Retrieval (IR) context and has implications for both system-centered and user-centered IR. While it has been established that the performance in discerning misinformation is affected…
Existing communications and behavioral theories have been adopted to address health misinformation. Although various theories and models have been used to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no framework specially designed for…
Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…
When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that…