The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable assumptions about the composition of the society, the model endogenously displays a growing average level of sc...

This paper investigates the problem of geo-social similarity among users of online social networks, based on the locations of their activities (e.g., posting messages or photographs). Finding pairs of geo-socially similar users or detecting that two sets of locations (of activities) belong to the same user has important applications in privacy protection, recommendation systems, urban planning,...

We explore the effects of social distance in experiments conducted over the Internet on three continents, in classroom laboratory sessions conducted in Israel and Spain, and in computer sessions pairing participants from different states, one in Texas and the other in California. Our design elicits individual behavior profiles over a range of contingencies, enabling us to identify heterogeneity...

Interface options offered to users for extracting content from information repositories such as YouTube are 1-dimensional. Users are presented with ubiquitous flat lists of content in menus and result lists, from which they must identify interesting content. Previous work has concentrated on the areas of user profiling and content filtering in order to retrieve and present relevant content to u...

This paper discusses the challenges of developing modes of distance education that afford maximum freedom for learners—including the ability to enroll continuously and to pace one’s own learning—and yet still create opportunities to work cooperatively in learning communities with other students. To resolve these often conflicting priorities, a new genre of networked-based learning tools known a...

We conduct a field experiment to explore the effect of social distance on the choice of economic opportunities in a virtual world community. We design trust games with partner selection, in which potential responders vary in social distance from the proposer, and the investment multiplier increases with social distance. The proposer can choose between the two trust games with the two different ...

This paper investigates how social distance can serve as a lens through which we can understand human–robot relationships and develop guidelines for robot design. In two studies, we examine the effects of distance based on physical proximity (proxemic distance), organizational status (power distance), and task structure (task distance) on people's experiences with and perceptions of a humanlike...

We examine three hypotheses at the foundation of theories concerned with the organization of social space and social solidarity in differentiated groups. The most important of these hypotheses is that interpersonal ties between actors in different positions of a social structure foster social solidarity; however, the theories are silent on the question of whether this effect of interpersonal ti...

Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. "close friends" "high lord"). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a c...