Social media networks (SMN) such as Facebook and Twitter are infamous for facilitating the spread of potentially false rumors. Although it has been argued that SMN enable their users to identify and challenge false rumors through collective efforts to make sense of unverified information—a...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network,...

Social media is currently an evolving “wave” in online business marketing. Marketers are beginning to drive the use of social media as a component in their marketing strategy and campaigns to reach out to customers and fans. Within the subdisciplines of marketing that may use social media...

We study how multiattribute product choices are affected by peer influence. We propose a two-stage conjoint-based approach to examine three behavioral mechanisms of peer influence. We find that when faced with information on peer choices, consumers update their attribute preferences in a...

Diliara Valeeva - Research Assistant, International Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Address: 24 Myasnitskaya str., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: dvaleeva@hse.ruOleg Poldin - Research Fellow,...

Poor sanitation, including the lack of clean functioning toilets, is a major factor contributing to morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases in the developing world.

How can minority cultures resist assimilation into a global monolith in an increasingly "small world"? Paradoxically, Axel rod found that local convergence can actually preserve global diversity if cultural influence is combined with homophily, the principle that "likes attract." However,...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effectivity of family policies in the context of different assumptions regarding the social structure of a society. We use an agent based simulation model to analyse the impact of family policies on individual fertility decisions and on cohort fertility,...

This paper investigates opinion dynamics and social influence in directed communication networks. We study the theoretical properties of a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals aggregate the information they receive from their neighbors by using weights that are a...