Related papers: Deliberation Among Informed Citizens: The Value of…
Misinformation -- false or misleading information -- is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and…
When we use the wisdom of the crowds, we usually rank the answers according to their popularity, especially when we cannot verify the answers. However, this can be very dangerous when the majority make systematic mistakes. A fundamental…
For a binary choice problem, the spatial coordination of decisions in an agent community is investigated both analytically and by means of stochastic computer simulations. The individual decisions are based on different local information…
Since this century, the speed, availability, and plethora of online informational content have made it increasingly difficult for humans to keep an overview of real-world situations, build a personal opinion, and sometimes even decide on…
In this paper, we investigate the role of uninformed individuals in consensus formation within opinion-swarming models for self-propelled particles. The proposed models are inspired by empirical observations in animal swarming, particularly…
Opinion formation and persuasion in argumentation are affected by three major factors: the argument itself, the source of the argument, and the properties of the audience. Understanding the role of each and the interplay between them is…
Opinion modeling aims to capture individual or group political preferences, enabling applications such as digital democracies, where models could help shape fairer and more popular policies. Given their versatility, strong generalization…
Interaction with others influences our opinions and behaviours. Our activities within various social circles lead to different opinions expressed in various situations, groups, and ways of communication. Earlier studies on agent-based…
In this survey, we review the literature investigating participatory budgeting as a social choice problem. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which citizens are asked to vote on how to allocate a given amount of public…
Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on commonsense tasks; however, these tasks are often posed as multiple-choice questions, allowing models to exploit systematic biases. Commonsense is also inherently…
Online disagreements often fail to produce understanding, instead reinforcing existing positions or escalating conflict. Prior work on predictors of successful persuasion in online discourse has largely focused on surface features such as…
Opinion dynamics is of paramount importance as it provides insights into the complex dynamics of opinion propagation and social relationship adjustment. It is assumed in most of the previous works that social relationships evolve much…
Participatory budgeting is a method of collectively understanding and addressing spending priorities where citizens vote on how a budget is spent, it is regularly run to improve the fairness of the distribution of public funds.…
A subjective expected utility policy making centre, managing complex, dynamic systems, needs to draw on the expertise of a variety of disparate panels of experts and integrate this information coherently. To achieve this, diverse supporting…
Rational decision making in its linguistic description means making logical decisions. In essence, a rational agent optimally processes all relevant information to achieve its goal. Rationality has two elements and these are the use of…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…
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…
Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…
A universal formula is shown to predict the dynamics of public opinion including eventual sudden and unexpected outbreaks of minority opinions within a generic parameter space of five dimensions. The formula is obtained combining and…
We propose a probabilistic model to aggregate the answers of respondents answering multiple-choice questions. The model does not assume that everyone has access to the same information, and so does not assume that the consensus answer is…