Related papers: Understanding (Ir)rational Herding Online

This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…

We propose a generic model for multiple choice situations in the presence of herding and compare it with recent empirical results from a Web-based music market experiment. The model predicts a phase transition between a weak imitation phase…

Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…

We initiate the study of the effects of non-transparency in decision rules on individuals' ability to improve in strategic learning settings. Inspired by real-life settings, such as loan approvals and college admissions, we remove the…

Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research…

Despite strong evidence for peer effects, little is known about how individuals balance intrinsic preferences and social learning in different choice environments. Using a combination of experiments and discrete choice modeling, we show…

Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group. However, it has been difficult for researchers to detect the inputs to these decisions and, in particular, how…

Simulating trajectories of virtual crowds is a commonly encountered task in Computer Graphics. Several recent works have applied Reinforcement Learning methods to animate virtual agents, however they often make different design choices when…

Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion-change via persuasion in deliberation online remain…

Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…

Machine Learning (ML) increasingly informs the allocation of opportunities to individuals and communities in areas such as lending, education, employment, and beyond. Such decisions often impact their subjects' future characteristics and…

We study social learning in which agents weight neighbors' opinions differently based on their degrees, capturing situations in which agents place more trust in well-connected individuals or, conversely, discount their influence. We derive…

Predictive models are omnipresent in automated and assisted decision making scenarios. But for the most part they are used as black boxes which output a prediction without understanding partially or even completely how different features…

Behavioral scientists have classically documented aversion to algorithmic decision aids, from simple linear models to AI. Sentiment, however, is changing and possibly accelerating AI helper usage. AI assistance is, arguably, most valuable…

Human collective tasks in teams and organizations increasingly require participation of members with diverse backgrounds working in networked social environments. However, little is known about how network structure and the functional…

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to assist human decision-making. When the goal of machine assistance is to improve the accuracy of human decisions, it might seem appealing to design ML algorithms that complement human…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in environments where they encounter social information such as other agents' answers, tool outputs, or human recommendations. In humans, such inputs influence judgments in ways that depend…

Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…

In real-world decision making, outcomes are often delayed, meaning individuals must make multiple decisions before receiving any feedback. Moreover, feedback can be presented in different ways: it may summarize the overall results of…

The main intreest of this study was to investigate the phenomenon of collective intelligence in an anonymous virtual environment developed for this purpose. In particular, we were interested in studiyng how dividing a fixed community in…