Related papers: The marginal majority effect: when social influenc…
The "majority dynamics" process on a social network begins with an initial phase, where the individuals are split into two competing parties, Red and Blue. Every day, everyone updates their affiliation to match the majority among those of…
Precipitated by rapid globalization, rising inequality, population growth, and longevity gains, social protection programs have been on the rise in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the last three decades. However, the…
The influence of a fixed number of agents with the same fixed behavior on the dynamics of the minority game is studied. Alternatively, the system studied can be considered the minority game with a change in the comfort threshold away from…
Deterministic evolutionary theory robustly predicts that populations displaying altruistic behaviours will be driven to extinction by mutant cheats that absorb common benefits but do not themselves contribute. Here we show that when…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
The friendship paradox implies that a person will, on average, have fewer friends than their friends do. Prior work has shown how the friendship paradox can lead to perception biases regarding behaviors that correlate with the number of…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
We study a model for social influence in which the agents' opinion is a continuous variable [G. Weisbuch et al., Complexity \textbf{7}, 2, 55 (2002)]. The convergent opinion adjustment process takes place as a result of random binary…
A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…
Crowdsourcing can identify high-quality solutions to problems; however, individual decisions are constrained by cognitive biases. We investigate some of these biases in an experimental model of a question-answering system. In both natural…
Individuals in free societies frequently exhibit striking coordination when making independent decisions en masse. Examples include the regular appearance of hit products or memes with substantially higher popularity compared to their…
This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
A long-standing debate is whether social influence improves the collective wisdom of a crowd or undermines it. This paper addresses this question based on a naive learning setting in influence systems theory: in our models individuals…
Observation of other people's choices can provide useful information in many circumstances. However, individuals may not utilize this information efficiently, i.e., they may make decision-making errors in social interactions. In this paper,…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
We study the effects of inhomogeneous influence of individuals on collective phenomena. We focus analytically on a typical model of the majority rule, applied to the completely connected agents. Two types of individuals $A$ and $B$ with…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
Recommendation algorithms are known to suffer from popularity bias; a few popular items are recommended frequently while the majority of other items are ignored. These recommendations are then consumed by the users, their reaction will be…