Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption

Identifying the hidden organizational principles and relevant structures of networks representing complex physical systems is fundamental to understand their properties. To this aim, uncovering the structures involving a network's prominent…

We study the idea of information design for inducing prosocial behavior in the context of electricity consumption. We consider a continuum of agents. Each agent has a different intrinsic motivation to reduce her power consumption. Each…

Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…

We consider a network of agents. Associated with each agent are her covariate and outcome. Agents influence each other's outcomes according to a certain connection/influence structure. A subset of the agents participate on a platform, and…

In a social group its members are caled here agents. Any two agents from the group may interact. The interaction consists of the exchange of information and it costs some energy. There exist subgroups of interacting agents which are…

Contextual utility theory integrates context-sensitive factors into utility-based decision-making models. It stresses the importance of understanding individual decision-makers' preferences, values, and beliefs and the situational factors…

Active consumer participation is seen as an integral part of the emerging smart grid. Examples include demand-side management programs, incorporation of consumer-owned energy storage or renewable energy units, and active energy trading.…

Collective phenomena in systems of interacting agents have helped us understand diverse social, ecological and biological observations. The corresponding explanations are challenged by incorrect information processing. In particular, the…

This paper studies the problem of distributed classification with a network of heterogeneous agents. The agents seek to jointly identify the underlying target class that best describes a sequence of observations. The problem is first…

Closeness is a global measure of centrality in networks, and a proxy for how influential actors are in social networks. In most network models, and many empirical networks, closeness is strongly correlated with degree. However, in social…

Whether citations can be objectively and reliably used to measure productivity and scientific quality of articles and researchers can, and should, be vigorously questioned. However, citations are widely used to estimate the productivity of…

Orseau and Ring, as well as Dewey, have recently described problems, including self-delusion, with the behavior of agents using various definitions of utility functions. An agent's utility function is defined in terms of the agent's history…

Image classification models have achieved satisfactory performance on many datasets, sometimes even better than human. However, The model attention is unclear since the lack of interpretability. This paper investigates the fidelity and…

Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the…

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 study the dynamics of opinions in a setting where a leader has a payoff that depends on agents' beliefs and where agents derive psychological utility from their beliefs. Agents sample a signal that maximises their utility and then…

We introduce the problem of assigning resources to improve their utilization. The motivation comes from settings where agents have uncertainty about their own values for using a resource, and where it is in the interest of a group that…

The degree to which individuals can exert influence on propagation of information and opinion dynamics in online communities is highly dependent on their social status. Therefore, there is a high demand for identifying influential users in…

The emergence and wide-spread use of online social networks has led to a dramatic increase on the availability of social activity data. Importantly, this data can be exploited to investigate, at a microscopic level, some of the problems…

To study the assumption that the utility maximization hypothesis implicitly adds to consumer theory, we consider a mathematical representation of pre-marginal revolution consumer theory based on subjective exchange ratios. We introduce two…