These days, as more and more people use online applications such as Wikipedia, Stack Overflow or Facebook, social phenomena that originally appeared in the offline world make an appearance online and new social phenomena emerge. This calls for narrowing the gap between computer science and social sciences in general, and sociology in particular. The opportunity here is twofold. First, the algorithmic approach can offer a new perspective on social phenomena previously studied in social sciences. Second, a better understanding of social sciences can be beneficial for computer scientists designing these online applications.
In this talk we will demonstrate the merits of the algorithmic approach for analyzing social phenomena by focusing on a significant online activity: forming and expressing opinions. We will first discuss a mathematical model of the process by which people form their opinion in a social network and analyze the effects it has on disagreement in society. Then, noting that opinions lead to long-term reputational effects, we will study how reputation influences the behavior of firms and in particular how it affects their hiring decisions.
Based on joint work with David Bindel and Jon Kleinberg.
Sigal Oren, Hebrew University and MSR Herzliya