Related papers: Opinion models, data, and politics
A statistical estimation model with qualitative input provides a mechanism to fuse human intuition in the form of qualitative information into a statistical model. We investigate the statistical properties of this model and devise a…
Social interactions influence people's opinions. In some situations, these interactions eventually yield a consensus opinion; in others, they can lead to opinion fragmentation and the formation of different opinion groups in the form of…
In the compromise model of continuous opinions proposed by Deffuant et al, the states of two agents in a network can start to converge if they are neighbors and if their opinions are sufficiently close to each other, below a given threshold…
In this paper, we consider the voter model with popularity bias. The influence of each node on its neighbors depends on its degree. We find the consensus probabilities and expected consensus times for each of the states. We also find the…
We build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise…
Maximum likelihood estimation furnishes powerful insights into voting theory, and the design of voting rules. However the MLE can usually be badly corrupted by a single outlying sample. This means that a single voter or a group of colluding…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…
The modeling of opinion dynamics has seen much study in varying academic disciplines. Understanding the complex ways information can be disseminated is a complicated problem for mathematicians as well as social scientists. We present a…
This paper focuses on the opinion dynamics under the influence of manipulative agents. This type of agents is characterized by the fact that their opinions follow a trajectory that does not respond to the dynamics of the model, although it…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning estimates the true environment through a world model in order to approximate the optimal policy. This family of algorithms usually benefits from better sample efficiency than their model-free counterparts.…
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…
Is it more effective to have a strong influence over a small domain, or a weaker influence over a larger one? Here, we introduce and analyse an off-lattice generalisation of the voter model, in which the range and strength of agents'…
In the $q$-voter model, the voter at $x$ changes its opinion at rate $f_x^q$, where $f_x$ is the fraction of neighbors with the opposite opinion. Mean-field calculations suggest that there should be coexistence between opinions if $q<1$ and…
In recent years, probabilistic forecasts techniques were proposed in research as well as in applications to integrate volatile renewable energy resources into the electrical grid. These techniques allow decision makers to take the…
We investigate opinion dynamics based on an agent-based model, and are interested in predicting the evolution of the percentages of the entire agent population that share an opinion. Since these opinion percentages can be seen as an…
A common problem in data analysis is the separation of signal and background. We revisit and generalise the so-called $sWeights$ method, which allows one to calculate an empirical estimate of the signal density of a control variable using a…
We show that the problem of political forecasting, i.e, predicting the result of elections and referendums, can be mapped to finding the ground state configuration of a classical spin system. Depending on the required prediction, this spin…
We propose a stochastic map model of economic dynamics. In the last decade, an array of observations in economics has been investigated in the econophysics literature, a major example being the universal features of inequality in terms of…
In the voter model, vertices of a graph (interpreted as voters) adopt one out of two opinions (0 and 1), and update their opinions at random times by copying the opinion of a neighbor chosen uniformly at random. This process is dual to a…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…