Related papers: The dynamics of strategic voting: pathways to cons…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
The present work analyses a particular scenario of consensus formation, where the individuals navigate across an underlying network defining the topology of the walks. The consensus, associated to a given opinion coded as a simple messages,…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
Attitudes can have a profound impact on socially relevant behaviours, such as voting. However, this effect is not uniform across situations or individuals, and it is at present difficult to predict whether attitudes will predict behaviour…
People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…
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…
Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo…
In many cases, recommendations are consumed by groups of users rather than individuals. In this paper, we present a system which recommends social events to groups. The system helps groups to organize a joint activity and collectively…
We consider synchronous iterative voting, where voters are given the opportunity to strategically choose their ballots depending on the outcome deduced from the previous collective choices.We propose two settings for synchronous iterative…
We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…
We consider a discrete opinion formation problem in a setting where agents are influenced by both information diffused by their social relations and from recommendations received directly from the social media manager. We study how the…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…
The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics…
The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of external…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…