Abstract:

  Persuasion is at the core of norm creation, emergence of collective action, and solutions to `tragedy of the commons' problems. In this paper, we show that the directionality of friendship ties affect the extent to which individuals can influence the behavior of each other. Moreover, we find that people are typically poor at perceiving the directionality of their friendship ties and that this can significantly limit their ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. This could lead to failures in establishing compatible norms, acting together, finding compromise solutions, and persuading others to act. We then suggest strategies to overcome this limitation by using two topological characteristics of the perceived friendship network. The findings of this paper have significant consequences for designing interventions that seek to harness social influence for collective action.

Bio :

Dr. Erez Shmueli is a senior lecturer and the head of the Big Data Lab at the department of Industrial Engineering at Tel-Aviv University and a research affiliate at the Media Lab at MIT.

He received his BA degree (with honors) in Computer Science from the Open University of Israel, and MSc and PhD degrees in Information Systems Engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, under the supervision of Prof. Yuval Elovici.

After completing his PhD, he spent two years as a post-doctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab, at the Human Dynamics group headed by Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland.

His main research interests include Big Data, Complex Networks, Computational Social Science, Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, Database Systems, Information Security and Privacy.

His professional experience includes five years as a programmer and a team leader in the Israeli Air-Force and three years as a project manager in Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.