Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Computer Science

Advisor

Rohit Parikh

Committee Members

Shweta Jain

Noson Yanofsky

Fenrong Liu

Subject Categories

Behavioral Economics | Other Computer Engineering

Keywords

Epistemic Logic, Group Reasoning, Knowledge

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is to build an epistemic logic system that is able to show the spreading of knowledge and beliefs in a social network that contains multiple subgroups. Epistemic logic is the study of logical systems that express mathematical properties of knowledge and belief. In recent years, there have been increasing number of new epistemic logic systems that are focused on community properties such as knowledge and belief adoption among friends.

We are interested in revisable and actionable social knowledge/belief that leads to a large group action. Instead of centralized coordination, bottom-up approach is our focus. We explore multiple methods of belief revision in social networks. Such belief revision in groups represents social influence and power to some degree. Both influence from friends and from experts are explained.

We define an intuitive concept of expected influence of a group. When different influence sources are suggesting conflicting actions, agents could make strategic decisions by analyzing expected influence of different subgroups. We then show some properties of expected influence in different network structures. We also simulate the strategic influence emerging in small-world networks which represents many real world networks.

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