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Exclusive social groups are ones in which the group members decide whether or not to admit a candidate to the group. Examples of exclusive social groups include academic departments and fraternal organizations. In the present paper we…
Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where…
We consider a certain class of nonlinear maps that preserve the probability simplex, i.e., stochastic maps, that are inspired by the DeGroot-Friedkin model of belief/opinion propagation over influence networks. The corresponding dynamical…
The ability of a small set of coordinated actors to manipulate opinions in online social networks poses a serious challenge to the fairness and integrity of public debate. We investigate this problem by studying how targeted stubborn agents…
We consider a group of agents connected by a social network who participate in majority dynamics: each agent starts with an opinion in {-1,+1} and repeatedly updates it to match the opinion of the majority of its neighbors. We assume that…
This paper presents a randomized self-stabilizing algorithm that elects a leader $r$ in a general $n$-node undirected graph and constructs a spanning tree $T$ rooted at $r$. The algorithm works under the synchronous message passing network…
Self-organising multi-agent systems regulate their components' behaviour voluntarily, according to a set of socially-constructed, mutually-agreed, and mutable social arrangements. In some systems, these arrangements may be applied with a…
Two main procedures characterize the way in which social actors evaluate the qualities of the options in decision-making processes: they either seek to evaluate their intrinsic qualities (individual learners), or they rely on the opinion of…
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…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
We use evolutionary game theory to examine how conflict-averse centrism can facilitate authoritarian success in polarized political conflicts. Such conflicts are often asymmetric: authoritarian actors can employ norm-breaking or coercive…
A model where agents show discrete behavior regarding their actions, but have continuous opinions that are updated by interacting with other agents is presented. This new updating rule is applied to both the voter and Sznajd models for…
Consider the following process on a network: Each agent initially holds either opinion blue or red; then, in each round, each agent looks at two random neighbors and, if the two have the same opinion, the agent adopts it. This process is…
We consider a committee voting on whether to adopt a reform under a quota rule, where members differ in how much they value the reform some supporting it, others opposing it. We examine how members can influence each other's votes through…
Many popular measures used in social network analysis, including centrality, are based on the random walk. The random walk is a model of a stochastic process where a node interacts with one other node at a time. However, the random walk may…
Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called Sub-Committee Voting…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…
Dynamic Random Subjective Expected Utility (DR-SEU) allows to model choice data observed from an agent or a population of agents whose beliefs about objective payoff-relevant states and tastes can both evolve stochastically. Our observable,…
I review and extend the set of unifying principles, which allow comparing all models of opinion dynamics within one single frame. Within the Global Unifying Frame (GUF), any specific update rule chosen to study opinion dynamics for discrete…
Core stability is a natural and well-studied notion for group fairness in multi-winner voting, where the task is to select a committee from a pool of candidates. We study the setting where voters either approve or disapprove of each…