Related papers: Informational Autocrats, Diverse Societies
Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…
With rapid increase in online information consumption, especially via social media sites, there have been concerns on whether people are getting selective exposure to a biased subset of the information space, where a user is receiving more…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
The mass media plays a fundamental role in the formation of public opinion, either by defining the topics of discussion or by making an emphasis on certain issues. Directly or indirectly, people get informed by consuming news from the…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
An informed sender communicates with an uninformed receiver through a sequence of uninformed mediators; agents' utilities depend on receiver's action and the state. For any number of mediators, the sender's optimal value is characterized.…
We study a Bayesian persuasion model with two-dimensional states of the world, in which the sender (she) and receiver (he) have heterogeneous prior beliefs and care about different dimensions. The receiver is a naive agent who has a…
A mediator is a mechanism that can only suggest actions to players, as a function of all agents' reported types, in a given game of incomplete information. We study what is achievable by two kinds of mediators, "strong" and "weak." Players…
This paper examines how competing sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) risk shape governance decisions and regulatory constraints. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, we analyse three dominant…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
In diffusion social learning over weakly-connected graphs, it has been shown recently that influential agents shape the beliefs of non-influential agents. This paper analyzes this mechanism more closely and addresses two main questions.…
We study a game of strategic information design between a sender, who chooses state-dependent information structures, a mediator who can then garble the signals generated from these structures, and a receiver who takes an action after…
In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of information spread, grounded on psychological insights on the formation and spread of beliefs. In our model, we consider a network of individuals who share two opposing types of information…
In this paper, we present a resource allocation mechanism for the problem of incentivizing filtering among a finite number of strategic social media platforms. We consider the presence of a strategic government and private knowledge of how…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
We study the mutual influence of authority and persuasion in the flow of opinion. Many social organizations are characterized by a hierarchical structure where the propagation of opinion is asymmetric. In the normal flow of opinion…
We use Gaussian mixtures to model formation and evolution of multi-modal beliefs and opinion uncertainty across social networks. In this model, opinions evolve by Bayesian belief update when incorporating exogenous factors (signals from…