Related papers: Optimal policy design for decision problems under …
Digital communication has made the public discourse considerably more complex, and new actors and strategies have emerged as a result of this seismic shift. Aside from the often-studied interactions among individuals during opinion…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
The well-known influence maximization problem aims at maximizing the influence of one information cascade in a social network by selecting appropriate seed users prior to the diffusion process. In its adaptive version, additional seed users…
Popularity dynamics in social media depend on a complex interplay of social influence between users and popularity-based recommendations that are provided by the platforms. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time dynamical system to…
Network autocorrelation models are widely used to evaluate the impact of social influence on some variable of interest. This is a large class of models that parsimoniously accounts for how one's neighbors influence one's own behaviors or…
Recommendation systems have received considerable attention recently. However, most research has been focused on improving the performance of collaborative filtering (CF) techniques. Social networks, indispensably, provide us extra…
Online social networks are ubiquitous parts of modern societies and the discussions that take place in these networks impact people's opinions on diverse topics, such as politics or vaccination. One of the most popular models to formally…
Opinion dynamics of a group of individuals is the change in the members' opinions through mutual interaction with each other. The related literature contains works in which the dynamics is modeled as a continuous system, of which behavioral…
This paper addresses the problem of designing recommendation systems for social networks and e-commerce platforms from a control-theoretic perspective. We treat the design of recommendation systems as a state-feedback infinite-horizon…
We consider the problem of influence maximization in fixed networks for contagion models in an adversarial setting. The goal is to select an optimal set of nodes to seed the influence process, such that the number of influenced nodes at the…
We present a cognitive model of opinion dynamics which studies the behavior of a population of interacting individuals in the context of risk of natural disaster. In particular, we investigate the response of the individuals to the…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
This paper studies a class of consensus dynamics where the interactions between agents are affected by a time-varying unknown scaling factor. This situation is encountered in the control of robotic fleets over a wireless network or in…
We propose a continuous-time multi-option nonlinear generalization of classical linear weighted-average opinion dynamics. Nonlinearity is introduced by saturating opinion exchanges, and this is enough to enable a significantly greater range…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity and…