Related papers: Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…
Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…
Social media has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles,…
This paper studies identification and inference of the welfare gain that results from switching from one policy (such as the status quo policy) to another policy. The welfare gain is not point identified in general when data are obtained…
Descriptive and inferential social network analysis has become common in public administration studies of network governance and management. A large literature has developed in two broad categories: antecedents of network structure, and…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
Prevention and intervention work done within community settings often face unique analytic challenges for rigorous evaluations. Since community prevention work (often geographically isolated) cannot be controlled in the same way other…
The Linear Threshold Model is a widely used model that describes how information diffuses through a social network. According to this model, an individual adopts an idea or product after the proportion of their neighbors who have adopted it…
Recent research has explored the increasingly important role of social media by examining the dynamics of individual and group behavior, characterizing patterns of information diffusion, and identifying influential individuals. In this…
This article proposes a synthetic theory of socio-epistemic structuration to understand the reproduction of inequality in contemporary societies. I argue that social reality is not only determined by material structures and social networks…
This paper investigates the case of interference, when a unit's treatment also affects other units' outcome. When interference is at work, policy evaluation mostly relies on the use of randomized experiments under cluster interference and…
Scientists have been interested in estimating causal peer effects to understand how people's behaviors are affected by their network peers. However, it is well known that identification and estimation of causal peer effects are challenging…
Modern society depends on the flow of information over online social networks, and users of popular platforms generate significant behavioral data about themselves and their social ties. However, it remains unclear what fundamental limits…
Predicting when an individual will adopt a new behavior is an important problem in application domains such as marketing and public health. This paper examines the perfor- mance of a wide variety of social network based measurements…
Much research has been done on studying the diffusion of ideas or technologies on social networks including the \textit{Influence Maximization} problem and many of its variations. Here, we investigate a type of inverse problem. Given a…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
Modern grid monitoring equipment enables utilities to collect detailed records of power interruptions. These data are aggregated to compute publicly reported metrics describing high-level characteristics of grid performance. The current…