Related papers: Estimating Social Norm Complementarities
Measures of textual similarity and divergence are increasingly used to study cultural change. But which measures align, in practice, with social evidence about change? We apply three different representations of text (topic models, document…
Sexual partnerships that overlap in time (concurrent relationships) may play a significant role in the HIV epidemic, but the precise effect is unclear. We derive edge-based compartmental models of disease spread in idealized dynamic…
Quantifying the public/private sector supply of contraceptive methods within countries is vital for effective and sustainable family planning (FP) delivery. In many low and middle-income countries (LMIC), measuring the contraceptive supply…
This paper proposes a novel empirical strategy to measure cultural justifications of domestic violence within households, with direct implications for demographic behavior and gender inequality. Leveraging survey data on individual…
Most of the mammal species hold polygynous mating systems. The majority of the marriage systems of mankind were also polygynous over civilized history, however, socially imposed monogamy gradually prevails throughout the world. This is…
Much research has been conducted on how consumption is related to human relations, for example, consumer communities organized around specific brands, or the way people use products to define their own identity and transmit a desired image.…
We demonstrate that individual behaviors directed at the attainment of distinctiveness can in fact produce complete social conformity. We thus offer an unexpected generative mechanism for this central social phenomenon. Specifically, we…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
Cutting-edge image generation has been praised for producing high-quality images, suggesting a ubiquitous future in a variety of applications. However, initial studies have pointed to the potential for harm due to predictive bias,…
As the deployment of large language models (LLMs) expands, there is an increasing demand for personalized LLMs. One method to personalize and guide the outputs of these models is by assigning a persona -- a role that describes the expected…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…
Social norms reflect shared expectations on acceptable behavior. Measuring social norms alignment remains challenging, with existing approaches typically relying on artificial closed-form evaluations such as multiple-choice questionnaires…
We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Decision to participate in education depends on the circumstances individual inherits and on the returns to education she expects as well. If one person from any socio-economically disadvantaged social group inherits poor circumstances…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
This study explores the marriage matching of only-child individuals and its outcome. Specifically, we analyze two aspects. First, we investigate how marital status (i.e., marriage with an only child, that with a non-only child and remaining…
In 2016, the majority of full-time employed women in the U.S. earned significantly less than comparable men. The extent to which women were affected by gender inequality in earnings, however, depended greatly on socio-economic…
Complementary fashion recommendation aims at identifying items from different categories (e.g. shirt, footwear, etc.) that "go well together" as an outfit. Most existing approaches learn representation for this task using labeled outfit…
Understanding patterns in mortality across subpopulations is essential for local health policy decision making. One of the key challenges of subnational mortality rate estimation is the presence of small populations and zero or near zero…