Recent uprisings in the Arab world consist of individuals revealing vastly different preferences than were expressed prior to the uprisings. This paper sheds light on the general mechanisms underlying large-scale social and institutional change. We employ an agent-based model to test the impact...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naively update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

We study a model of social learning in networks where the dynamics of beliefs are driven by conversations of dissonance-minimizing agents. Given their current beliefs, agents make statements, tune them to the statements of their associates, and then revise their beliefs. We characterize the...

We investigate the role of conflicting interests in a boundedly rational model of belief dynamics. Individuals have different preferences about the action to take, are subject to persuasion bias and repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in a social network. They communicate strategically...

This paper analyses a simultaneous game of network formation and information acquisition where the benefit structure is such that the benefit that an agent derives from the network she is located in depends on the maximum information that someone in her neighbourhood, including herself,...

Markets coordinate the flow of information in the economy, aggregating it through the price mechanism. We develop a dynamic model of information transmission and aggregation in financial and other social networks in which continued membership in the network is contingent on the accuracy of...

I study a bounded rationality model of opinion formation in which there are two different types of agents: naive agents and sophisticated agents. All agents update their opinions by taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. Naive agents truthfully report their opinions, but sophisticated...

We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model interact...

We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents they follow (their 'ingroup' or those they trust) and, in addition, they want to adjust their...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...