Related papers: The marginal majority effect: when social influenc…

Public opinion is subject to peer interaction via social networks and external pressure from the media, advertising, and other actors. In this paper, we study the interaction between external and peer influence on the stochastic opinion…

Different measures have been proposed to predict whether individuals will adopt a new behavior in online social networks, given the influence produced by their neighbors. In this paper, we show one can achieve significant improvement over…

It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…

Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…

We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…

"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…

This paper investigates whether the decoy effect - specifically the attraction effect - can foster cooperation in social networks. In a lab experiment, we show that introducing a dominated option increases the selection of the target…

Social learning is a fundamental mechanism shaping decision-making across numerous social networks, including social trading platforms. In those platforms, investors combine traditional investing with copying the behavior of others.…

We use a model of opinion formation to study the consequences of some mechanisms attempting to enforce the right behaviour in a society. We start from a model where the possible choices are not equivalent (such is the case when the agents…

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature…

Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent…

Pluralistic ignorance is a social-psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals privately hold beliefs that differ from perceived group norms. Traditional models, based on opinion dynamics with private and public states, fail to…

Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…

We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…

We study an opinion formation model that takes into account that individuals have diverse preferences when forming their opinion regarding a particular issue. We show that the system exhibits a phenomenon called "diversity-induced…

Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…

We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…

We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We…

Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…

A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…