Related papers: Errors in Learning from Others' Choices
Understanding cooperation in social systems is challenging because the ever-changing rules that govern societies interact with individual actions, resulting in intricate collective outcomes. In virtual-world experiments, we allowed people…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
In the real world, robots frequently make errors, yet little is known about people's social responses to errors outside of lab settings. Prior work has shown that social signals are reliable and useful for error management in constrained…
Identifying factors that affect human decision making and quantifying their influence remain essential and challenging tasks for the design and implementation of social and technological communication systems. We report results of a…
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms…
Choice decisions made by users of online applications can suffer from biases due to the users' level of engagement. For instance, low engagement users may make random choices with no concern for the quality of items offered. This biased…
A major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions.…
Interactions between pieces of information (entities) play a substantial role in the way an individual acts on them: adoption of a product, the spread of news, strategy choice, etc. However, the underlying interaction mechanisms are often…
Humans are adept at uncovering abstract associations in the world around them, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Intuitively, learning the higher-order structure of statistical relationships should involve complex…
We designed and ran an experiment to test how often people's choices are reversed by others' recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In our experiment participants were first asked to provide…
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
We consider decision problems under uncertainty where the options available to a decision maker and the resulting outcome are related through a causal mechanism which is unknown to the decision maker. We ask how a decision maker can learn…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important…
Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
This study introduces an agent-based model to study how regret, uncertainty, and social norms interact to shape vaccination behavior during epidemics. The model integrates three behavioral mechanisms, anticipated regret, evolving norms, and…