Related papers: The marginal majority effect: when social influenc…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
Our opinions, which things we like or dislike, depend on the opinions of those around us. Nowadays, we are influenced by the opinions of online strangers, expressed in comments and ratings on online platforms. Here, we perform novel…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
We present analytic and numerical results for two models, namely the minority model and the bar-attendance model, which offer simple paradigms for a competitive marketplace. Both models feature heterogeneous agents with bounded rationality…
Empirical studies are inconclusive about the underlying mechanisms that shape the interrelated dynamics of opinions and interpersonal attraction. There is strong evidence that others whom are liked have a positive influence on opinions and…
With resurgent interest in individual differences in perception, cognition and behavioural control, as early indicators of disease, endophenotypes, or a means to relate brain structure to function, behavioural tasks are increasingly being…
Decisions to pursue higher education are not fully explained by economic incentives, with social influence and peer effects playing a crucial, yet dynamically understudied, role. This paper develops a theoretical non-linear dynamics model…
Human-robot interaction exerts influence towards the human, which often changes behavior. This article explores an externality of this changed behavior - preference change. It expands on previous work on preference change in AI systems.…
Mutualistic relationships among the different species are ubiquitous in nature. To prevent mutualism from slipping into antagonism, a host often invokes a "carrot and stick" approach towards symbionts with a stabilizing effect on their…
Risk assessment algorithms in criminal justice put people's lives at the discretion of a simple statistical tool. This thesis explores how algorithmic decision-making in criminal policy can exhibit feedback effects, where disadvantage…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…
We present a new decision rule, \emph{maximin safety}, that seeks to maintain a large margin from the worst outcome, in much the same way minimax regret seeks to minimize distance from the best. We argue that maximin safety is valuable both…
Models that provide insight into how extreme positions regarding any social phenomenon may spread in a society or at the global scale are of great current interest. A realistic model must account for the fact that globalization and internet…
We consider the dynamics of an extension of the influential Granovetter model of social behavior, where individuals are affected by their personal preferences and observation of the neighbors' behavior. Individuals are arranged in a network…
Recent research shows that humans are heavily influenced by online social interactions: We are more likely to perform actions which, in the past, have led to positive social feedback. We introduce a quantitative model of behavior changes in…