Related papers: Learning from Viral Content
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…
The increased popularity and ubiquitous availability of online social networks and globalised Internet access have affected the way in which people share content. The information that users willingly disclose on these platforms can be used…
We consider social learning in a changing world. Society can remain responsive to state changes only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which limits the value of social learning. When the state is close to persistent, a…
We build a model of information cascades on feed-based networks, taking into account the finite attention span of users, message generation rates and message forwarding rates. Using this model, we study through simulations, the effect of…
We consider a large class of social learning models in which a group of agents face uncertainty regarding a state of the world, share the same utility function, observe private signals, and interact in a general dynamic setting. We…
Information flows are the result of a constant exchange in Online Social Networks (OSNs). OSN users create and share varying types of information in real-time throughout a day. Virality is introduced as a term to describe information that…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but…
This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When…
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence…
Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends…
An informed planner wishes to spread information among a group of agents in order to induce efficient coordination -- say the adoption of a new technology with positive externalities. The agents are connected via a social network. The…
Observation of other people's choices can provide useful information in many circumstances. However, individuals may not utilize this information efficiently, i.e., they may make decision-making errors in social interactions. In this paper,…
We propose a model for the social flow of information in the form of text data, which simulates the posting and sharing of short social media posts. Nodes in a graph representing a social network take turns generating words, leading to a…
One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing…
Large-scale data resulting from users online interactions provide the ultimate source of information to study emergent social phenomena on the Web. From individual actions of users to observable collective behaviors, different mechanisms…
We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…