Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption

We study the evolution of behavioral rules in environments with multiple contexts. Agents copy rules used by better-performing peers in the same context and apply them across contexts. Multiple contexts turn discrete-time imitation dynamics…

We propose a family of models to study the evolution of ties in a network of interacting agents by reinforcement and penalization of their connections according to certain local laws of interaction. The family of stochastic dynamical…

Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…

Interaction with individuals from other socioeconomic classes has been shown to be a main driver for social mobility. We employ tools of social identity theory and network analysis to show how exposure to individuals of different social…

Conventional economic and socio-behavioural models assume perfect symmetric access to information and rational behaviour among interacting agents in a social system. However, real-world events and observations appear to contradict such…

A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the…

Recently, we introduced in arXiv:1105.2434 a model for product adoption in social networks with multiple products, where the agents, influenced by their neighbours, can adopt one out of several alternatives. We identify and analyze here…

Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…

We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…

We provide simple models for the utility function (or psychology) of an actor trading a multitude of goods for money. In this framework, money has no intrinsic consumption value, but is required as a medium of exchange. A collection of such…

An identity denotes the role an individual or a group plays in highly differentiated contemporary societies. In this paper, our goal is to classify Twitter users based on their role identities. We first collect a coarse-grained public…

We consider a distributed multi-user system where individual entities possess observations or perceptions of one another, while the truth is only known to themselves, and they might have an interest in withholding or distorting the truth.…

In this paper, we study opinion dynamics in a balanced social structure consisting of two groups. Agents learn the true state of the world naively learning from their neighbors and from an unbiased source of information. Agents want to…

We address the problem of learning representations from observations of a scene involving an agent and an external object the agent interacts with. To this end, we propose a representation learning framework extracting the location in…

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…

In various economic environments, people observe other people with whom they strategically interact. We can model such information-sharing relations as an information network, and the strategic interactions as a game on the network. When…

We introduce a statistical agent based model to describe the phenomenon of drug abuse and its dynamical evolution at the individual and global level. The agents are heterogeneous with respect to their intrinsic inclination to drugs, to…

We revisit a recently introduced agent model[ACS {\bf 11}, 99 (2008)], where economic growth is a consequence of education (human capital formation) and innovation, and investigate the influence of the agents' social network, both on an…

We propose a continuous-time nonlinear model of opinion dynamics with utility-maximizing agents connected via a social influence network. A distinguishing feature of the proposed model is the inclusion of an opinion-dependent…

We introduce a simple network model that is inspired by social information networks such as twitter. Agents are nodes, connecting to another agent by building a directed edge has a cost, and reaching other agents via short directed paths…