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Voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income, and other measurable factors like behaviour in previous elections or referenda are of key importance in modelling opinion formation dynamics.…
Credit scores are critical for allocating consumer debt in the United States, yet little evidence is available on their performance. We benchmark a widely used credit score against a machine learning model of consumer default and find…
The extent to which individuals commit to their partner for life has important implications. This paper develops a lifecycle collective model of the household, through which it characterizes behavior in three prominent alternative types of…
Democracies are built upon secure and reliable voting systems. Electronic voting systems seek to replace ballot papers and boxes with computer hardware and software. Proposed electronic election schemes have been subjected to scrutiny, with…
Compositional data (i.e., data comprising random variables that sum up to a constant) arises in many applications including microbiome studies, chemical ecology, political science, and experimental designs. Yet when compositional data serve…
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…
The voter model is a toy model of consensus formation based on nearest-neighbor interactions. A voter sits at each vertex in a hypercubic lattice (of dimension $d$) and is in one of two possible opinion states. The opinion state of each…
Voting protocols seek to provide integrity and vote privacy in elections. To achieve integrity, procedures have been proposed allowing voters to verify their vote - however this impacts both the user experience and privacy. Especially, vote…
Sharing our goals with others and setting public challenges for ourselves is a topic that has been the center of many discussions. This study examines reading challenges, how participation in them has changed throughout the years, and how…
This paper presents a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. It reports on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users' aggregate voting behavior.…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
Studies have indicated that personality is related to achievement, and several personality assessment models have been developed. However, most are either questionnaires or based on marker systems, which entails limitations. We proposed a…
We deal with the random combinatorial structures called assemblies. By weakening the logarithmic condition which assures regularity of the number of components of a given order, we extend the notion of logarithmic assemblies. Using the…
Objective estimators of multimedia quality are often judged by comparing estimates with subjective "truth data," most often via Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) or mean-squared error (MSE). But subjective test results contain noise, so…
We consider the participatory budgeting problem where each of $n$ voters specifies additive utilities over $m$ candidate projects with given sizes, and the goal is to choose a subset of projects (i.e., a committee) with total size at most…
The adaptive voter model allows for studying the interplay between homophily, the tendency of like-minded individuals to attract each other, and social influence, the tendency for connected individuals to influence each other. However, it…
This paper studies user attributes in light of current concerns in the recommender system community: diversity, coverage, calibration, and data minimization. In experiments with a conventional context-aware recommender system that leverages…
We show how voting may be viewed naturally from an algebraic perspective by viewing voting profiles as elements of certain well-studied $\mathbb{Q}S_n$-modules. By using only a handful of simple combinatorial objects (e.g., tabloids) and…
In this manuscript we analyse the leading statistical properties of fluctuations of (log) 3-month US Treasury bill quotation in the secondary market, namely: probability density function, autocorrelation, absolute values autocorrelation,…
The dissertation consists of three essays on responsible and sustainable finance. I show that local communities should be seen as stakeholders to decisions made by corporations. In the first essay, I examine whether the imposition of…