Related papers: Informational Autocrats, Diverse Societies
Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience. Outlets are often accused of exhibiting a systematic bias in this selection process,…
Data-based decisionmaking must account for the manipulation of data by agents who are aware of how decisions are being made and want to affect their allocations. We study a framework in which, due to such manipulation, data becomes less…
Advances in AI offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level. Large language models and autonomous agents now let influence campaigns reach unprecedented scale and precision. Generative tools can expand…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
As political polarization in the United States continues to rise, the question of whether polarized individuals can fruitfully cooperate becomes pressing. Although diversity of individual perspectives typically leads to superior team…
In this paper, we propose a two-layer adoption-opinion model to study the diffusion of two competing technologies within a population whose opinions evolve under social influence and adoption-driven feedback. After adopting one technology,…
Understanding how individuals change their opinions is essential to mitigate the harmful effect of fake news and stop opinion polarization. Building upon an extremely flexible opinion dynamics model that can capture the key microscopic…
Why is our society multicultural? Based on the two mechanisms of homophily and social influence, the classical model for the dissemination of cultures proposed by Axelrod predicts the existence of a fragmented regime where different…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
Autocrats use secret police to stay in power, as these organizations deter and suppress opposition to their rule. Existing research shows that secret police succeed at this but, surprisingly, also that they are not as ubiquitous in…
Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize social and political life in unpredictable ways, raising questions about the principles that ought to guide its development and regulation. By examining digital advertising and social media…
Media organizations bear great reponsibility because of their considerable influence on shaping beliefs and positions of our society. Any form of media can contain overly biased content, e.g., by reporting on political events in a selective…
Consumers of mass media must have a comprehensive, balanced and plural selection of news to get an unbiased perspective; but achieving this goal can be very challenging, laborious and time consuming. News stories development over time, its…
We study a communication game between a sender and a receiver. The sender chooses one of her signals about the state of the world (i.e., anecdotes) and communicates to the receiver who takes an action affecting both players. The sender and…
Mainstream media, through their decisions on what to cover and how to frame the stories they cover, can mislead readers without using outright falsehoods. Therefore, it is crucial to have tools that expose these editorial choices underlying…
We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is…
Expressions of dissent against authority are an important feature of most societies, and efforts to suppress such expressions are common. Modern digital communications, social media, and Internet surveillance and censorship technologies are…
People are often challenged to select one among several alternatives. This situation is present not only in decisions about complex issues, e.g., political or academic choices, but also about trivial ones, as in daily purchases at a…