Related papers: Electoral Accountability and Selection with Person…

We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…

Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…

We introduce and study the problem of detecting whether an agent is updating their prior beliefs given new evidence in an optimal way that is Bayesian, or whether they are biased towards their own prior. In our model, biased agents form…

Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…

The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…

We develop an overlapping generations model where each agent observes a verifiable private signal about the state and, with positive probability, also receives signals disclosed by his predecessor. The agent then takes an action and decides…

In rank aggregation, members of a population rank issues to decide which are collectively preferred. We focus instead on identifying divisive issues that express disagreements among the preferences of individuals. We analyse the properties…

We study the problem of election control through social influence when the manipulator is allowed to use the locations that she acquired on the network for sending \emph{both} positive and negative messages on \emph{multiple} candidates,…

We present a novel model for the effect of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and reinforcement on election results. Our model extends the well known voter model with zealots to include reinforcement. We analyze the behaviour of the model,…

Nowadays, in societies threatened by atomization, selfishness, short-term thinking, and alienation from political life, there is a renewed debate about classical questions concerning the quality of democratic decision-making. In this work a…

An electoral spoiler is usually defined as a losing candidate whose removal would affect the outcome by changing the winner. So far, spoiler effects have been analyzed primarily for single-winner electoral systems. We consider this subject…

We focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…

In the traditional voting manipulation literature, it is assumed that a group of manipulators jointly misrepresent their preferences to get a certain candidate elected, while the remaining voters are truthful. In this paper, we depart from…

This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…

Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…

This mini-review presents extensions of the voter model that incorporate various plausible features of real decision-making processes by individuals. Although these generalizations are not calibrated by empirical data, the resulting…

We show that, in large population games, decentralized information aggregation generically corrects for individual-level biases. This establishes a new testable aggregate efficiency benchmark where the behavior of boundedly rational agents…

Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…

Following the idea of Bayesian learning via Gaussian mixture model, we organically combine the backward-looking information contained in the historical data and the forward-looking information implied by the market portfolio, which is…

We use agent-based modeling to investigate the effect of conservatism and partisanship on the efficiency with which large populations solve the density classification task--a paradigmatic problem for information aggregation and consensus…