ISyE Seminar “Persuasion, News Sharing, and Cascades on Social Networks”

Please join us for our next seminar via Zoom! This seminar will feature Ali Jadbabaie from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who will discuss persuasion, news sharing, and cascades on social networks.

Note: All seminars this semester will be research-focused. 

3:30 p.m. - Graduate seminar
4:30 p.m. - Reception
Zoom link
Password: ISyE2022

About the seminar

In this talk, Professor Jadbabaie will present a game-theoretic model of strategic, online news dissemination on Twitter-like social networks. Agents are endowed with subjective, heterogeneous priors on some unobservable real-valued state of the world. At the beginning, a small fraction of agents observes a piece of news with certain credibility. The agents who receive the news decide to share or not with their followers based on whether the news will persuade their followers to move their beliefs closer to the agents’. The researchers characterize agents’ sharing decision, which leads to an endogenous SI process. They characterize the size of endogenous news spread at the equilibrium and show that low-credibility news can potentially trigger a larger sharing cascade than news with higher credibility.

About the speaker

Ali Jadbabaie is the JR East Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a core faculty member in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), and a PI at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, he served as the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as the cofounder and Associate Director of IDSS at MIT and the founding Program head of the IDSS flagship Ph.D. program on Social and Engineering Systems. He received a B.S. with High Honors from Sharif University of Technology, his M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).