Related papers: Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
Opinion dynamics of a group of individuals is the change in the members' opinions through mutual interaction with each other. The related literature contains works in which the dynamics is modeled as a continuous system, of which behavioral…
What are the key-features that enable an information diffusion model to explain the inherent dynamic, and often competitive, nature of real-world propagation phenomena? In this paper we aim to answer this question by proposing a novel class…
When decision-makers can directly intervene, policy evaluation algorithms give valid causal estimates. In off-policy evaluation (OPE), there may exist unobserved variables that both impact the dynamics and are used by the unknown behavior…
Will a new smartphone application diffuse deeply in the population or will it sink into oblivion soon? To predict this, we argue that common models of spread of innovations based on cascade dynamics or epidemics may not be fully adequate.…
Many products and innovations become well-known and widely adopted through the social interactions of individuals in a population. The Bass diffusion model has been widely used to model the temporal evolution of adoption in such social…
Truly intelligent systems are expected to make critical decisions with incomplete and uncertain data. Active feature acquisition (AFA), where features are sequentially acquired to improve the prediction, is a step towards this goal.…
Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
Familiarity with a simulation platform can seduce modellers into accepting untested assumptions for convenience of implementation. These assumptions may have consequences greater than commonly suspected, and it is important that modellers…
Given only aggregate choice data and limited information about how menus are distributed across the population, we describe what can be inferred robustly about the distribution of preferences (or more general decision rules). We strengthen…
Information diffusion on social networks has been described as a collective outcome of threshold behaviors in the framework of threshold models. However, since the existing models do not take into account individuals' optimization problem,…
In many real-world settings, agents must learn from an offline dataset gathered by some prior behavior policy. Such a setting naturally leads to distribution shift between the behavior policy and the target policy being trained - requiring…
Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture contains two key factors required to model the process of diffusion of innovations, namely, social influence (i.e., individuals become more similar when they interact) and homophily (i.e.,…
This paper investigates an optimal control problem for an adoption-opinion model that couples opinion dynamics with a compartmental adoption framework on a multilayer network to study the diffusion of sustainable behaviors. Adoption evolves…
A person's decision to adopt an idea or product is often driven by the decisions of peers, mediated through a network of social ties. A common way of modeling adoption dynamics is to use threshold models, where a node may become an adopter…
Innovation diffusion in the networked population is an essential process that drives the progress of human society. Despite the recent advances in network science, a fundamental understanding of network properties that regulate such…
Diffusion guidance is a powerful technique that enables controllable and high-fidelity sample generation with diffusion models. At a high level, it modifies the score function by incorporating a guidance term that steers the generative…
When the full stock of a new product is quickly sold in a few days or weeks, one has the impression that new technologies develop and conquer the market in a very easy way. This may be true for some new technologies, for example the cell…
Mathematical models are invaluable for understanding and predicting how biological systems behave, although their construction requires specifying mechanisms and relationships that are often not perfectly known. In the presence of multiple…
In contemporary educational systems, academic performance indicators play a central role in institutional evaluation and in the interpretation of student trajectories. However, under conditions of rapid technological change, the inferential…