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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

When to drop an important piece of information? Studying the effect of timing on information cascades in real-time social networks

Wenning Deng¹, Antonio Rangel; ¹California Institute of Technology

Presenter: Wenning Deng

Most decisions are informed by personal and social information. Sequential sampling models have been applied in these situations to examine how individuals integrate personal and social information in the choice processes. We created a new paradigm involving information cascades, embedding participants in a hidden social network where they made decisions in real-time and could influence one another. We showed that drift-diffusion models can describe both the dynamics of the individual decision processes and the information cascades in the group. Furthermore, we perturbed the network with a shock and analyzed how the timing of a critical information release modulated its impact on information cascades.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

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