Related papers: Informational Autocrats, Diverse Societies
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
The ability of a society to make the right decisions on relevant matters relies on its capability to properly aggregate the noisy information spread across the individuals it is made of. In this paper we study the information aggregation…
We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert…
Perceptions of political bias in the media are formed directly, through the independent consumption of the published outputs of a media organization, and indirectly, through observing the collective responses of political allies and…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
One form of long-term behavior revealed by opinion dynamics simulations is intermittency, where an individual cycles between eras of stable, constant beliefs and turbulent, fluctuating beliefs, for example when inferring the political bias…
It has been observed people tend to have opinions that are far more internally consistent than it would be reasonable to expect. Here, we study how that observation might emerge from changing how agents trust the opinions of their peers in…
We present a model of news media that shape consumer beliefs by providing information (signals about an exogenous state) and narratives (models of what determines outcomes). To amplify consumers' engagement, media maximize consumers'…
Disinformation research has proliferated in reaction to widespread false, problematic beliefs purported to explain major social phenomena. Yet while the effects of disinformation are well-known, there is less consensus about its causes; the…
Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as…
Since the information available is fundamental for our perceptions and opinions, we are interested in understanding the conditions allowing for a good information to be disseminated. This paper explores opinion dynamics by means of…
Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media…
Modern information environments, especially social media, are highly complex systems that exceed individual processing capacities such as humans' limited attention. This environment/cognition mismatch can increase susceptibility to…
The Bayesian persuasion model studies communication between an informed sender and a receiver with a payoff-relevant action, emphasizing the ability of a sender to extract maximal surplus from his informational advantage. In this paper we…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
The celebrated Bayesian persuasion model considers strategic communication between an informed agent (the sender) and uninformed decision makers (the receivers). The current rapidly-growing literature mostly assumes a dichotomy: either the…
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…