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Social media platforms provide millions of professional content creators with sustainable incomes. Their income is largely influenced by their number of views and followers, which in turn depends on the platform's recommender system (RS).…
Reputations provide a powerful mechanism to sustain cooperation, as individuals cooperate with those of good social standing. But how should moral reputations be updated as we observe social behavior, and when will a population converge on…
Recommender systems have become increasingly important with the rise of the web as a medium for electronic and business transactions. One of the key drivers of this technology is the ease with which users can provide feedback about their…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…
Recommendation systems today exert a strong influence on consumer behavior and individual perceptions of the world. By using collaborative filtering (CF) methods to create recommendations, it generates a continuous feedback loop in which…
Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right…
This paper presents a model of network formation and public goods provision in local communities. Here, networks can sustain public good provision by spreading information about people's behaviour. I find a critical threshold in network…
We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with…
This paper studies identification and inference of the welfare gain that results from switching from one policy (such as the status quo policy) to another policy. The welfare gain is not point identified in general when data are obtained…
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…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that social and cooperative behavior can be affected by cognitive and neurological factors, suggesting the existence of state-based decision-making mechanisms that may have emerged by…
Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item…
This paper demonstrates how reinforcement learning can explain two puzzling empirical patterns in household consumption behavior during economic downturns. I develop a model where agents use Q-learning with neural network approximation to…
We investigate in this paper the theory and econometrics of optimal matchings with competing criteria. The surplus from a marriage match, for instance, may depend both on the incomes and on the educations of the partners, as well as on…
Does machine learning and AI ensure that social biases thrive ? This paper aims to analyse this issue. Indeed, as algorithms are informed by data, if these are corrupted, from a social bias perspective, good machine learning algorithms…
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
Social ties are strongly related to well-being. But what characterizes this relationship? This study investigates social mechanisms explaining how social ties affect well-being through social integration and social influence, and how…