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We compare the likelihood of different socially relevant features to allow the evolutionary emergence and maintenance of cooperation in a generalized variant of the iterated Prisoners Dilemma game. Results show that the average…
Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…
Despite strong evidence for peer effects, little is known about how individuals balance intrinsic preferences and social learning in different choice environments. Using a combination of experiments and discrete choice modeling, we show…
Modern recommender systems lie at the heart of complex ecosystems that couple the behavior of users, content providers, advertisers, and other actors. Despite this, the focus of the majority of recommender research -- and most practical…
Industrial policy has returned to the centre of economic governance, particularly in the high-tech sectors where positive network externalities in demand make market dominance self-reinforcing. This paper studies the welfare effects of an…
This study investigates possibility and impossibility results of the repugnant and sadistic conclusions in population ethics and economics. The repugnant conclusion says that an enormous population with very low well-being is socially…
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with…
Can constantly comparing ourselves to others lead to overconsumption, ultimately increasing the ecological footprint? How do social comparisons shape green preferences over time? To answer these questions, we develop an environmental…
We discuss price competition when positive network effects are the only other factor in consumption choices. We show that partitioning consumers into two groups creates a rich enough interaction structure to induce negative marginal demand…
We show, both numerically and analytically, that the consequences of 'wiring up' a competitive population depend quite dramatically on the interplay between the local connectivity and the global resources. With modest global resources,…
The objective of this study is applying a utility based analysis to a comparatively efficient design experiment which can capture people's perception towards the various components of a commodity. Here we studied the multi-dimensional…
Much research has been conducted on how consumption is related to human relations, for example, consumer communities organized around specific brands, or the way people use products to define their own identity and transmit a desired image.…
A mathematical model of measurement of the perception of well-being for groups with increasing incomes, but proportionally unequal is proposed. Assuming that welfare grows with own income and decreases with relative inequality (income of…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
This article uses data of subjective Life Satisfaction aggregated to the community level in Canada and examines the spatial interdependencies and spatial spillovers of community happiness. A theoretical model of utility is presented. Using…
Social hierarchy is important that can not be ignored in human socioeconomic activities and in the animal world. Here we incorporate this factor into the evolutionary game to see what impact it could have on the cooperation outcome. The…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…