Related papers: A small-area ecological approach for estimating vo…
Understanding how local environments influence individual behaviors, such as voting patterns or suicidal tendencies, is crucial in social science to reveal and reduce spatial disparities and promote social well-being. With the increasing…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
Social media play a key role in shaping citizens' political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The…
Adaptive populations such as those in financial markets and distributed control can be modeled by the Minority Game. We consider how their dynamics depends on the agents' initial preferences of strategies, when the agents use linear or…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Identifying and quantifying factors influencing human decision making remains an outstanding challenge, impacting the performance and predictability of social and technological systems. In many cases, system failures are traced to human…
A distinction in reasons and motives for choosing a particular political leader establishes the key difference between older and young democracy. The former is based on electoral history, while the latter is based on feelings and personal…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
Adaptation to local environments often occurs through natural selection acting on a large number of loci, each having a weak phenotypic effect. One way to detect these loci is to identify genetic polymorphisms that exhibit high correlation…
Large-scale assessment data typically include numerous categorical variables, often affected by missing values. Motivated by the challenges arising in this framework, we extend the knockoffs method for selecting predictors to settings with…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
Household adoption of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems is central to the green energy transition, yet diffusion depends on social influence and behavioral biases, as well as payback economics. This study develops a parsimonious Markovian…
The Brain Drain phenomenon is particularly heterogeneous and is characterized by peculiar specifications. It influences the economic fundamentals of both the country of origin and the host one in terms of human capital accumulation. Here,…
Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, events, or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by covariates like race, gender, and socioeconomic status.…
We study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…
Occupancy models are used in statistical ecology to estimate species dispersion. The two components of an occupancy model are the detection and occupancy probabilities, with the main interest being in the occupancy probabilities. We show…