Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption
We study consumption dependence in the context of random utility and repeated choice. We show that, in the presence of consumption dependence, the random utility model is a misspecified model of repeated rational choice. This…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
Across income groups and countries, individual citizens perceive economic inequality spectacularly wrong. These misperceptions have far-reaching consequences, as it is perceived inequality, not actualinequality informing redistributive…
It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…
Dissensus is a modeling framework for networks of dynamic agents in competition for scarce resources. Originally inspired by biological cells behaviors, it fits also marketing, finance and many other application areas. Competition is often…
In this paper, we study the global stability properties of a multi-agent model of natural resource consumption that balances ecological and social network components in determining the consumption behavior of a group of agents. The social…
We consider a social system of interacting heterogeneous agents with learning abilities, a model close to Random Field Ising Models, where the random field corresponds to the idiosyncratic willingness to pay. Given a fixed price, agents…
In multi-agent systems, the agents may have goals that depend on a social, shared interpretation about the facts occurring in the system. These are the so-called social goals. Artificial institutions provide such a social interpretation by…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
The complementarity and substitutability between products are essential concepts in retail and marketing. Qualitatively, two products are said to be substitutable if a customer can replace one product by the other, while they are…
Motivated by recent works in the communication and psychology literature, we model and study the role social identity -- a person's sense of belonging to a group -- plays in human information consumption. A hallmark of Social Identity…
The efficient use of available resources is a key factor in achieving success on both personal and organizational levels. One of the crucial resources in knowledge economy is time. The ability to force others to adapt to our schedule even…
While there is ample evidence that social and communication networks play a key role during the spread of new ideas, products, or services, network effects are expected to have diminished influence in the stationary state, when all users…
The role of perception in conscious behavior and decision-making is examined. The effect of spatial and temporal stochasticity in the acquisition of beliefs is discussed. The idea of an agent as a locally strongly coupled group of states…
Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…
Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…
Humans inevitably develop a sense of the relationships between objects, some of which are based on their appearance. Some pairs of objects might be seen as being alternatives to each other (such as two pairs of jeans), while others may be…
We discuss the stationary states of a model economy in which $N$ heterogeneous adaptive consumers purchase commodity bundles repeatedly from $P$ sellers. The system undergoes a transition from an inefficient to an efficient state as the…
Communities are an important feature of social networks. In fact, it seems that communities are necessary for a social network to be efficient. However, there exist very few formal studies of the actual role of communities in social…
Signalling social status through the consumption of visible goods has often been perceived as a way in which individuals seek to emulate or move up compared to others within the community. Using representative migration survey data from the…