Related papers: Electoral Accountability and Selection with Person…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
In content-based online platforms, use of aggregate user feedback (say, the sum of votes) is commonplace as the "gold standard" for measuring content quality. Use of vote aggregates, however, is at odds with the existing empirical…
We study the problem of eliciting and aggregating probabilistic information from multiple agents. In order to successfully aggregate the predictions of agents, the principal needs to elicit some notion of confidence from agents, capturing…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
We investigate opinion dynamics in a fully-connected system, consisting of $n$ identical and anonymous agents, where one of the opinions (which is called correct) represents a piece of information to disseminate. In more detail, one source…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
An algorithm effects a causal representation of relations between features and labels in the human's perception. Such a representation might conflict with the human's prior belief. Explanations can direct the human's attention to the…
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
An agenda-setter repeatedly proposes a spatial policy to voters until some proposal is accepted. Voters have distinct but correlated preferences and receive private signals about the common state. I investigate whether the agenda-setter…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
We study a variant of the voter model on a coevolving network in which interactions of two individuals with differing opinions only lead to an agreement on one of these opinions with a fixed probability $q$. Otherwise, with probability…
A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e.…