Advertising competes for scarce consumer attention, so more profitable advertisers send more messages to break through the others’ clutter. Multiple equilibria can arise: more messages in aggregate induce more "shouting to be heard", dissipating profit. Equilibria can involve a small range of loud shouters or large range of quiet whisperers. All advertisers prefer there to be less shouting. The...

In this article, we argue that the exclusion of autistic people from meaningful involvement in research is both ethically and epistemologically problematic, and constitutes a significant barrier to research impact. By the term ‘meaningful’, we refer to the inclusion of different autistic voices not merely as sources of empirical material, but as active participants in the production of knowledg...

Much work in AI is devoted to the problem of how computers can acquire beliefs about the world through perception, but little effort is devoted to the problem of how computers can acquire beliefs through testimony. This paper is part of a continuing project whose ultimate goal is that of constructing an implementable model of how agents acquire knowledge through testimony. In particular, it loo...

O ver thousands of years, astronomy has evolved from hand-drawn maps of the night sky to breathtaking telescope images of the far-away cosmos. Yet despite this advance in technology, most of our information about the Universe has come from photon messengers. This changed in September 2015 with the detection of gravitational waves from a black hole merger at the Laser Interferometer Gravitationa...

The massacre at Columbine High School last year unleashed a torrent of fresh concern over the threat that violence poses to society. It also energized a government research effort to understand and prevent violence. Ironically, this flurry of activity comes at a time when youth violence, as reflected in crime statistics, is in decline.

The power of the unaided individual mind is highly overrated. Much human creativity is social, arising from activities that take place in a social context in which interaction with other people and the artifacts that embody collective knowledge are essential contributors. Social creativity is not a luxury but a necessity to address the problems faced by societies in the 21 century. Our research...

Word of mouth (WOM) has always been one of the most credible and influential sources of information for a consumer. With the advent of the Internet, new mediums of communication, such as blogs and social networking sites, have opened up, allowing more consumers to gather WOM information more easily than ever before. In this study, I examine the usefulness of online WOM, particularly from blogs ...