Related papers: Informational Autocrats, Diverse Societies
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
This work focus on the effects of an external mass media on continuous opinion dynamics with heterogeneous bounds of confidence. We modified the original Deffuant et al. and Hegselmann and Krause models to incorporate both, an external mass…
Suppose a decision maker wants to predict weather tomorrow by eliciting and aggregating information from crowd. How can the decision maker incentivize the crowds to report their information truthfully? Many truthful peer prediction…
In this work we consider the impact of information spread in time-varying social networks, where agents request to follow other agents with aligned opinions while dropping ties to neighbors whose posts are too dissimilar to their own views.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
Algorithms increasingly serve as information mediators--from social media feeds and targeted advertising to the increasing ubiquity of LLMs. This engenders a joint process where agents combine private, algorithmically-mediated signals with…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a "dissenting" opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people,…
A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e.…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Artificial intelligence functions not as an epistemic leveller, but as an accelerant of cognitive stratification, entrenching and formalising informational castes within liberal-democratic societies. Synthesising formal epistemology,…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
Agents with different ideologies often form alliances to achieve their goals. Paradoxically, ideologically similar agents are often opponents. In this paper, ideologically heterogeneous agents choose the ideological composition of their…
This paper models legislative decision-making with an agenda setter who can propose policies sequentially, tailoring each proposal to the status quo that prevails after prior votes. Voters are sophisticated and the agenda setter cannot…
An individual's opinions about media bias derive from their own independent assessment of media outputs combined with peer pressure from networked political allies and opponents. Here we generalize previous idealized, probabilistic models…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…
Despite the increasing diffusion of the Internet technology, TV remains the principal medium of communication. People's perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and opinions about matter of facts get (in)formed through the information reported on by…