Related papers: Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
The emergence and wide-spread use of online social networks has led to a dramatic increase on the availability of social activity data. Importantly, this data can be exploited to investigate, at a microscopic level, some of the problems…
Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms. In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast the sales of…
As online social networks continue to be commonly used for the dissemination of information to the public, understanding the phenomena that govern information diffusion is crucial for many security and safety-related applications, such as…
Automated decision systems are increasingly used for consequential decision making -- for a variety of reasons. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque models, which do not (or hardly) allow for understanding how or why a given…
Familiar statistical tests and estimates are obtained by the direct observation of cases of interest: a clinical trial of a new drug, for instance, will compare the drug's effects on a relevant set of patients and controls. Sometimes,…
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…
Recent work has framed decision-making as a sequence modeling problem using generative models such as diffusion models. Although promising, these approaches often overlook latent factors that exhibit evolving dynamics, elements that are…
The advent and proliferation of social media have led to the development of mathematical models describing the evolution of beliefs/opinions in an ecosystem composed of socially interacting users. The goal is to gain insights into…
An individual's opinion concerning political bias in the media is shaped by exogenous factors (independent analysis of media outputs) and endogenous factors (social activity, e.g. peer pressure by political allies and opponents in a…
We introduce a utility-driven bounded-confidence model of opinion dynamics in which opinions associated with higher utility exert stronger social influence. In the regime where all agents belong to a single opinion cluster, we derive a…
Social trends or fashions are spontaneous collective decisions made by large portions of a community, often without an apparent good reason. The spontaneous formation of trends provides a well documented mechanism for the spread of…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
It is commonly accepted that the quality of requirements specifications impacts subsequent software engineering activities. However, we still lack empirical evidence to support organizations in deciding whether their requirements are good…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
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…
Threshold-driven models and game theory are two fundamental paradigms for describing human interactions in social systems. However, in mimicking social contagion processes, models that simultaneously incorporate these two mechanisms have…
Cognitive processes undergo various fluctuations and transient states across different temporal scales. Superstatistics are emerging as a flexible framework for incorporating such non-stationary dynamics into existing cognitive model…
We propose kinetic models for the spread of permanent innovations and transient fads by the mechanism of social reinforcement. Each individual can be in one of M+1 states of awareness 0,1,2,...,M, with state M corresponding to adopting an…