Related papers: Bystander effect emerges from individual psycholog…
As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those…
We describe a Bayesian model for social learning of a random variable in which agents might observe each other over a directed network. The outcomes produced are compared to those from a model in which observations occur randomly over a…
Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
I study the problem of social learning in a model where agents move sequentially. Each agent receives a private signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions in a neighborhood of individuals, and chooses her…
The motion of pedestrian crowds (e.g. for simulation of an evacuation situation) can be modeled as a multi-body system of self driven particles with repulsive interaction. We use a few simple situations to determine the simplest allowed…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…
In randomized experiments, interactions between units might generate a treatment diffusion process. This is common when the treatment of interest is an actual object or product that can be shared among peers (e.g., flyers, booklets,…
Identifying factors that affect human decision making and quantifying their influence remain essential and challenging tasks for the design and implementation of social and technological communication systems. We report results of a…
A stylized experiment, the public goods game, has taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to contribute more to shared resources than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing…
Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…
Understanding how people form and revise their perception of risk is central to designing efficient risk communication methods, eliciting risk awareness, and avoiding unnecessary anxiety among the public. However, public responses to…
Social contagion has been studied in various contexts. Many instances of social contagion can be modeled as an infection process where a specific state (adoption of product, fad, knowledge, behavior, etc.) spreads from individual to…