Related papers: Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…
Leadership in social groups is often a dynamic characteristic that emerges from interactions and opinion exchange. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals with strong opinions tend to gain influence, at the same time maintaining…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
In a world where ideas flow freely between people across multiple platforms, we often find ourselves relying on others' information without an objective standard to judge whether those opinions are accurate. The present study tests an…
Blogs have become one of the most successful tools of the Web 2.0 because of their ease of use and the availability of open platforms. They have quickly spread in the education field thanks to the many attractive qualities that have been…
Modeling human ratings data subject to raters' decision uncertainty is an attractive problem in applied statistics. In view of the complex interplay between emotion and decision making in rating processes, final raters' choices seldom…
We leverage diffusion models to study the robustness-performance tradeoff of robust classifiers. Our approach introduces a simple, pretrained diffusion method to generate low-norm counterfactual examples (CEs): semantically altered data…
While new technologies are expected to revolutionise and become game-changers in improving the efficiencies and practises of our daily lives, it is also critical to investigate and understand the barriers and opportunities faced by their…
We study a simple model of how social behaviors, like trends and opinions, propagate in networks where individuals adopt the trend when they are informed by threshold $T$ neighbors who are adopters. Using a dynamic message-passing…
Diffusion-based learning has settled as a rising paradigm in generative recommendation, outperforming traditional approaches built upon variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks. Despite their effectiveness, concerns have…
In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of information spread, grounded on psychological insights on the formation and spread of beliefs. In our model, we consider a network of individuals who share two opposing types of information…
The socioeconomic impact of pollution naturally comes with uncertainty due to, e.g., current new technological developments in emissions' abatement or demographic changes. On top of that, the trend of the future costs of the environmental…
Most models of social contagion take peer exposure to be a corollary of adoption, yet in many settings, the visibility of one's adoption behavior happens through a separate decision process. In online systems, product designers can define…
Objective prior distributions represent an important tool that allows one to have the advantages of using the Bayesian framework even when information about the parameters of a model is not available. The usual objective approaches work off…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
We study the ordering dynamics of nonlinear voter models with multiple states, also providing a discussion of the two-state model. The rate with which an individual adopts an opinion scales as the $q$-th power of the number of the…
The presence of uncertainty in policy evaluation significantly complicates the process of policy ranking and selection in real-world settings. We formally consider offline policy selection as learning preferences over a set of policy…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…
On a variety of complex decision-making tasks, from doctors prescribing treatment to judges setting bail, machine learning algorithms have been shown to outperform expert human judgments. One complication, however, is that it is often…