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When environmental regulations are unpopular, policymakers often attribute resistance to information frictions and poor communication. We test this idea in the context of a major climate policy: Germany's Heating Law of 2023, which mandates…
Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…
The aim of behaviour change is to help people to change aspects of their behaviour for the better (e.g., to decrease calorie intake, to drink in moderation, to take more exercise, to complete a course of antibiotics once started, etc.). In…
Content that drives engagement need not be the same content that drives willingness to pay. We study how polarizing content affects engagement (time on site) and commitment (subscriptions and retention) on a major news platform. We measure…
There have been numerous studies evaluating bias of LLMs towards political topics. However, how positions towards these topics in model outputs are highly sensitive to the prompt. What happens when the prompt itself is suggestive of certain…
Offline reinforcement learning provides a viable approach to obtain advanced control strategies for dynamical systems, in particular when direct interaction with the environment is not available. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
Understanding how sustainable behaviors spread within heterogeneous societies requires the integration of behavioral data, social influence mechanisms, and structured approaches to control. In this paper, we propose a data-driven…
The proliferation of online social networks has significantly reshaped the way individuals access and engage with information. While these platforms offer unprecedented connectivity, they may foster environments where users are increasingly…
Agent-based models are versatile tools for studying how societal opinion change, including political polarization and cultural diffusion, emerges from individual behavior. This study expands agents' psychological realism using…
This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…
Online social networks have dramatically altered the landscape of public discourse, creating both opportunities for enhanced civic participation and risks of deepening social divisions. Prevalent approaches to studying online polarization…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…
The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is…
Advertisement and propaganda have changed continuously in the past decades, mainly due to the people's interactions at online platforms and social networks, and operate nowadays reaching a highly specific online audience instead targeting…
Social network based information campaigns can be used for promoting beneficial health behaviours and mitigating polarisation (e.g. regarding climate change or vaccines). Network-based intervention strategies typically rely on full…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
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…
This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing…
Modern AI agents increasingly combine conversational interaction with autonomous task execution, such as coding and web research, raising a natural question: What happens when an agent engaged in long-horizon tasks is exposed to user…