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Reputation-based cooperation on social networks offers a causal mechanism between graph properties and social trust. Recent papers on the `structural microfoundations` of the society used this insight to show how demographic processes, such…
Social influence is a strong determinant of food consumption, which in turn influences health. Although consistent observations have been made on the role of social factors in driving similarities in food consumption, much less is known…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
Understanding how competitive pressure affects risk-taking is crucial in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. This study examines these effects using bench press competition data, where individuals make risk-based choices under…
To study the interplay between global market choice and local peer pressure, we construct a minority-game-like econophysical model. In this so-called networked minority game model, every selfish player uses both the historical minority…
Many-to-one matching markets exist in numerous different forms, such as college admissions, matching medical interns to hospitals for residencies, assigning housing to college students, and the classic firms and workers market. In all these…
The interplay of social and strategic motivations in human interactions is a largely unexplored question in collective social phenomena. Whether individuals' decisions are taken in a pure strategic basis or due to social pressure without a…
A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…
Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…
Why do some national music markets sustain a rich musical diversity whereas others converge on mostly formulaic output? The existing models of cultural consumption (superstar economics, rational addiction, Bayesian social learning) each…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes applications like hiring, yet their potential for unfair decision-making remains understudied in generative and retrieval settings. In this work, we examine the…
People recommender systems may affect the exposure that users receive in social networking platforms, influencing attention dynamics and potentially strengthening pre-existing inequalities that disproportionately affect certain groups. In…
Decades of research in machine learning have given us powerful tools for making accurate predictions. But when used in social settings and on human inputs, better accuracy does not immediately translate to better social outcomes. To…
The underlying idea behind the construction of indices of economic inequality is based on measuring deviations of various portions of low incomes from certain references or benchmarks, that could be point measures like population mean or…
The online exchange of social recognition including, for instance, the Facebook "like" appears to produce a scarce allocation without a clear utility function defined for anyone involved. Given the importance attached to such digital…
All economies require physical resource consumption to grow and maintain their structure. The modern economy is additionally characterized by private debt. The Human and Resources with MONEY (HARMONEY) economic growth model links these…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
Investigations of social influence in collective decision-making have become possible due to recent technologies and platforms that record interactions in far larger groups than could be studied before. Herding and its impact on…