Related papers: Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
Quantifying the impact of regulatory policies on social welfare generally requires the identification of counterfactual distributions. Many of these policies (e.g. minimum wages or minimum working time) generate mass points and/or…
This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
The global dynamics of event cascades are often governed by the local dynamics of peer influence. However, detecting social influence from observational data is challenging due to confounds like homophily and practical issues like missing…
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
We propose a new nonparametric modeling framework for causal inference when outcomes depend on how agents are linked in a social or economic network. Such network interference describes a large literature on treatment spillovers, social…
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
We review and conceptualize recent advances in causal inference under network interference, drawing on a complex and diverse body of work that ranges from causal inference, statistical network analysis, economics, the health sciences, and…
We study whether a social planner can improve the efficiency of learning, measured by the expected total welfare loss, in a sequential decision-making environment. Agents arrive in order and each makes a binary action based on their private…
In Communication Theory, intermedia agenda-setting refers to the influence that different news sources may have on each other, and how this subsequently affects the breadth of information that is presented to the public. Several studies…
Social learning is defined as the ability of a population to aggregate information, a process which must crucially depend on the mechanisms of social interaction. Consumers choosing which product to buy, or voters deciding which option to…
This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…
This paper studies experimental designs for estimation and inference on policies with spillover effects. Units are organized into a finite number of large clusters and interact in unknown ways within each cluster. First, we introduce a…
The focus of this paper is modeling what we call a Social Radar, i.e. a method to estimate the relative influence between social agents, by sampling their opinions and as they evolve, after injecting in the network stubborn agents. The…
Social influence plays a significant role in shaping individual sentiments and actions, particularly in a world of ubiquitous digital interconnection. The rapid development of generative AI has engendered well-founded concerns regarding the…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
Public management and policy scholars have engaged in extensive development of theory and empirical study of networks and collaborative systems of governance. This scholarship has focused on understanding the mechanisms of network formation…
Addiction to internet-based social media has increasingly emerged as a critical social problem, especially among young adults and teenagers. Based on multiple research studies, excessive usage of social media may have detrimental…