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In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot…
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…
There is great interest in the dynamics of health behaviors in social networks and how they affect collective public health outcomes, but measuring population health behaviors over time and space requires substantial resources. Here, we use…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
Societal responses to environmental change vary widely, even under comparable shocks, reflecting differences in both policy measures and public reactions shaped by cultural and socioeconomic contexts. We examine mask-wearing dynamics across…
Framing has significant but subtle effects on public opinion and policy. We propose an NLP framework to measure entity-centric frames. We use it to understand media coverage on police violence in the United States in a new Police Violence…
Abortion remains one of the most controversial topics, especially after overturning Roe v. Wade ruling in the United States. Previous literature showed that the illegality of abortion could have serious consequences, as women might seek…
The emergence of the novel Coronavirus Disease in late 2019 (COVID-19) and subsequent pandemic led to an immense disruption in the daily lives of almost everyone on the planet. Faced with the consequences of inaction, most national…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are similar to them in characteristics, such as, race, ethnicity, age, gender, or interests. In this paper, we investigate if individuals exhibit racial homophily…
The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has exposed many flaws in the decision-making strategies used to distribute resources to combat global health crises. In this paper, we leverage reinforcement learning and optimization to improve…
The use of video surveillance in public spaces -- both by government agencies and by private citizens -- has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly in light of rapid advances in face-recognition technology. But it…
Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
In New York City, neighborhood policing was adopted at the police precinct level over the years 2015-2018, and it is of interest to both (1) evaluate the impact of the policy, and (2) understand what types of communities are most impacted…
Existing models of political violence often emphasize discrete transitions, when conflicts emerge, escalate, or subside, without considering the longer trajectories of violence that accumulate across time and space. This paper introduces a…