Related papers: Public Persuasion with Endogenous Fact-Checking
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
In the classical Bayesian persuasion model an informed player and an uninformed one engage in a static interaction. The informed player, the sender, knows the state of nature, while the uninformed one, the receiver, does not. The informed…
In this paper, we expand the Bayesian persuasion framework to account for unobserved confounding variables in sender-receiver interactions. While traditional models assume that belief updates follow Bayesian principles, real-world scenarios…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
With the increasing growth of social media, people have started relying heavily on the information shared therein to form opinions and make decisions. While such a reliance is motivation for a variety of parties to promote information, it…
Televised debates between presidential candidates are often regarded as the exemplar of persuasive communication. Yet, recent evidence from Le Pennec and Pons (2023) indicates that they may not sway voters as strongly as popular belief…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
It is well-known that subjective beliefs cannot be identified with traditional choice data unless we impose the strong assumption that preferences are state-independent. This is seen as one of the biggest pitfalls of incentivized belief…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
The growing reliance on social media for news consumption necessitates effective countermeasures to mitigate the rapid spread of misinformation. Prebunking, a proactive method that arms users with accurate information before they come…
A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e.…
Human verification under adversarial information flow operates as a cost-bounded decision procedure constrained by working memory limits and cognitive biases. We introduce the Verification Cost Asymmetry (VCA) coefficient, formalizing it as…
Disinformation, irrespective of domain or language, aims to deceive or manipulate public opinion, typically through employing advanced persuasion techniques. Qualitative and quantitative research on the weaponisation of persuasion…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and…
It is believed that interventions that change the media's costs of misreporting can increase the information provided by media outlets. This paper analyzes the validity of this claim and the welfare implications of those types of…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
We consider a counter-adversarial sequential decision-making problem where an agent computes its private belief (posterior distribution) of the current state of the world, by filtering private information. According to its private belief,…