Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption

Social network position confers power and social capital. In the setting of online social networks that have massive reach, creating mathematical representations of social capital is an important step towards understanding how network…

This paper develops strategic foundations for an important statistical model of random networks with heterogeneous expected degrees. Based on this, we show how social networking services that subtly alter the costs and indirect benefits of…

This paper considers the problem of shaping agent utility functions in a transactive energy system to ensure the optimal energy price at a competitive equilibrium is always socially acceptable, that is, below a prescribed threshold. Agents…

We prove that the consumption functions in optimal savings problems are asymptotically linear if the marginal utility is regularly varying. We also analytically characterize the asymptotic marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) out of…

Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…

We study a matching problem between agents and public goods, in settings without monetary transfers. Since goods are public, they have no capacity constraints. There is no exogenously defined budget of goods to be provided. Rather, each…

This paper analyzes the impact of peer effects on electricity consumption of a network of rational, utility-maximizing users. Users derive utility from consuming electricity as well as consuming less energy than their neighbors. However, a…

The structure of social relations is fundamental for the construction of plausible simulation scenarios. It shapes the way actors interact and create their identity within overlapping social contexts. Each actor interacts in multiple…

In this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…

This paper analyses how risk-taking behaviour and preferences over consumption rank can emerge as a neutrally stable equilibrium when individuals face an anti-coordination task. If in an otherwise homogeneous society information about…

Social status, defined as the relative rank or position that an individual holds in a social hierarchy, is known to be among the most important motivating forces in social behaviors. In this paper, we consider the notion of status from the…

Purpose: We propose a model to present a possible mechanism for obtaining sizeable behavioural structures by simulating an agent based on the evolutionary public good game with available social learning. Methods: The model considered a…

Knowledge acquisition by consumers is a key process in the diffusion of innovations. However, in standard theories of the representative agent, agents do not learn and innovations are adopted instantaneously. Here, we show that in a…

The dynamics of competing opinions in social network play an important role in society, with many applications in diverse social contexts as consensus, elections, morality and so on. Here we study a model of interacting agents connected in…

In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework that model human social networks as an undirected dot-product graph of independent individuals. Their relationships are only determined by a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. by maximizing an…

Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance…

From social networks to P2P systems, network sampling arises in many settings. We present a detailed study on the nature of biases in network sampling strategies to shed light on how best to sample from networks. We investigate connections…

We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear in the real world. Affordances relate the agent's actions to their effects when taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of the…

We study the self-assembly of a complex network of collaborations among self-interested agents. The agents can maintain different levels of cooperation with different partners. Further, they continuously, selectively, and independently…

We consider a scenario where an artificial agent is reading a stream of text composed of a set of narrations, and it is informed about the identity of some of the individuals that are mentioned in the text portion that is currently being…