Related papers: Power of the Crowd
We study the Galam majority rule dynamics with contrarian behavior and an oscillating external propaganda, in a population of agents that can adopt one of two possible opinions. In an iteration step, a random agent interacts with other…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
Opinion dynamics on social networks have been received considerable attentions in recent years. Nevertheless, just a few works have theoretically analyzed the condition in which a certain opinion can spread in the whole structured…
Consider an election between k candidates in which each voter votes randomly (but not necessarily independently) and suppose that there is a single candidate that every voter prefers (in the sense that each voter is more likely to vote for…
The asymptotic expansion of the distribution of the gradient test statistic is derived for a composite hypothesis under a sequence of Pitman alternative hypotheses converging to the null hypothesis at rate $n^{-1/2}$, $n$ being the sample…
We study the spread of a persuasive new idea through a population of continuous-time random walkers in one dimension. The idea spreads via social gatherings involving groups of nearby walkers who act according to a biased "majority rule":…
Distributed voting is a fundamental topic in distributed computing. In pull voting, in each step every vertex chooses a neighbour uniformly at random, and adopts its opinion. The voting is completed when all vertices hold the same opinion.…
This article is concerned with the bottom-up hierarchical system and public debate model proposed by Galam, as well as a spatial version of the public debate model. In all three models, there is a population of individuals who are…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
The "power of choice" has been shown to radically alter the behavior of a number of randomized algorithms. Here we explore the effects of choice on models of tree and network growth. In our models each new node has k randomly chosen…
The dynamics of opinion is a complex and interesting process, especially for the systems with large number individuals. It is usually hard to describe the evolutionary features of these systems. In this paper, we study the self excitation…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
We propose a mathematical model to measure how multiple repetitions may influence in the ultimate proportion of the population never hearing a rumor during a given outbreak. The model is a multi-dimensional continuous-time Markov chain that…
Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data where nobody can claim absolute certainty, due to current state of scientific knowledge, are studied. The cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza are…
Online discussion threads are important means for individual decision-making and for aggregating collective judgments, e.g. the `wisdom of crowds'. Empirical investigations of the wisdom of crowds are currently ambivalent about the role…
We investigate the statistics of trees grown from some initial tree by attaching links to preexisting vertices, with attachment probabilities depending only on the valence of these vertices. We consider the asymptotic mass distribution that…
Given a Galton-Watson process conditioned to have total progeny equal to $n$, we study the asymptotic probability that this conditioned Galton-Watson process has distance to the border bigger or equal than $k$, as the number of nodes $n…