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Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…

Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…

Social learning refers to the process by which networked strategic agents learn an unknown state of the world by observing private state-related signals as well as other agents' actions. In their classic work, Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and…

The global dynamics of event cascades are often governed by the local dynamics of peer influence. However, detecting social influence from observational data is challenging due to confounds like homophily and practical issues like missing…

Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…

Social learning, a fundamental process through which individuals shape their beliefs and perspectives via observation and interaction with others, is critical for the development of our society and the functioning of social governance.…

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…

Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…

Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…

In recent years, statistical physics' methodologies have proven extremely successful in offering insights into the mechanisms that govern social interactions. However, the question of whether these models are able to capture trends observed…

This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…

Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…

Related to an idea of Lewin, a mathematical model for behavioral changes under the influence of a social field is developed. The social field reflects public opinion, social norms and trends. It is not only given by external factors (the…

I study peer effects that arise from irreversible decisions in the absence of a standard social equilibrium. I model a latent sequence of decisions in continuous time and obtain a closed-form expression for the likelihood, which allows to…

The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some…

We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural…

How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…

Predicting undesirable events during the execution of a business process instance provides the process participants with an opportunity to intervene and keep the process aligned with its goals. Few approaches for tackling this challenge…

No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…

Our interactions with technology do not just shape our individual experiences. They also affect people around us. Although previous research has addressed such "witness" experiences, the actual effect of interaction design on the witness…