Related papers: Status substitution and conspicuous consumption

The emergence of cooperation in the groups of interacting agents is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in many complex systems studied in social science and ecology, even in the situations where one would expect the agent to use…

This paper considers neural representation through the lens of active inference, a normative framework for understanding brain function. It delves into how living organisms employ generative models to minimize the discrepancy between…

We develop original models to study interacting agents in financial markets and in social networks. Within these models randomness is vital as a form of shock or news that decays with time. Agents learn from their observations and learning…

One of the reasons behind the success of Social Network Analysis is its simple and general graph model made of nodes (representing individuals) and ties. However, when we focus on our daily on-line experience we must confront a more complex…

Traditional social learning frameworks consider environments with a homogeneous state, where each agent receives observations conditioned on that true state of nature. In this work, we relax this assumption and study the distributed…

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…

We introduce a generalization of the concept of sufficientarianism, intended to rank allocations involving multiple consumption goods. In ranking allocations of goods for a fixed society of agents, sufficientarianism posits that allocations…

We present a behavioral definition of an agent's perceived implication that uniquely identifies a subjective state-space representing her view of a decision problem, and which may differ from the modeler's. By examining belief updating…

Recommender systems assist users in navigating complex information spaces and focus their attention on the content most relevant to their needs. Often these systems rely on user activity or descriptions of the content. Social annotation…

The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on…

We consider a sharing economy network where agents embedded in a graph share their resources. This is a fundamental model that abstracts numerous emerging applications of collaborative consumption systems. The agents generate a random…

We consider a group of strategic agents who must each repeatedly take one of two possible actions. They learn which of the two actions is preferable from initial private signals, and by observing the actions of their neighbors in a social…

Networks are representations of complex underlying social processes. However, the same given network may be more suitable to model one behavior of individuals than another. In many cases, aggregate population models may be more effective…

In this paper, a new framework to study weighed networks is introduced. The idea behind this methodology is to consider that each node of the network is an agent that desires to satisfy his/her preferences in an economic sense. Moreover,…

In this paper we study the problem of social learning under multiple true hypotheses and self-interested agents which exchange information over a graph. In this setup, each agent receives data that might be generated from a different…

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…

Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual interpersonal…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

Social acceptability is an important consideration for HCI designers who develop technologies for social contexts. However, the current theoretical foundations of social acceptability research do not account for the complex interactions…