A Social Networks Approach to Public Relations on Twitter: Social Mediators and Mediated Public Relations

This study proposes theoretical and practical frameworks to systematically examine mediated public relations in social media spaces. We applied a social network conceptual framework to identify and characterize social mediators that connect the US State Department with its international public. The results showed that social mediators vary in terms of their formality and interdependence. Formal social mediators were primarily US government agencies while informal social mediators were nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals. Notably, relationships with populations in the Middle East and North Africa were mediated primarily by informal actors, and formal mediators played a key role in connecting the public with everywhere else in the world. Government-related formal mediators and informal social mediators showed similar levels of bilateral relationships. In contrast, news media, the most traditional public relations mediators, were rarely found as social mediators and demonstrated the most unilateral relationships.     

Can World System Theory predict news flow on twitter? The case of government-sponsored broadcasting

Social media platforms provide world governments with the opportunity to distribute news content from their broadcast channels directly to foreign publics [Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press] World System Theory, which has successfully explained and predicted the structure of international news flow, is now being challenged. Specifically, these social platforms undermined assumptions regarding the one-way flow of information toward audiences and the exclusive institutional nature of the players in the international system. This study examines the unique case of government-sponsored news media and its international news flow. It finds that while the structure of the international news flow on Twitter exhibits a hierarchical core–periphery structure, non-institutional actors (e.g. bloggers) conformed less than institutional players (e.g. governments and news media) to that structure. This study also found that non-institutional actors assumed the role of bridging news sources and audiences, a role traditionally reserved for a small minority of elite news media. The growing and diversified pool of information mediators resulted in a more fragmented network of news flow, siloed, rather than interconnected. Research findings are synthesized and analyzed in the context of international broadcasting and social media scholarship.     

Stochastic Learning Dynamics and Speed of Convergence in Population Games

We study how long it takes for large populations of interacting agents to come close to Nash equilibrium when they adapt their behavior using a stochastic better reply dynamic. Prior work considers this question mainly for 2 × 2 games and potential games; here we characterize convergence times for general weakly acyclic games, including coordination games, dominance solvable games, games with strategic complementarities, potential games, and many others with applications in economics, biology, and distributed control. If players' better replies are governed by idiosyncratic shocks, the convergence time can grow exponentially in the population size; moreover, this is true even in games with very simple payoff structures. However, if their responses are sufficiently correlated due to aggregate shocks, the convergence time is greatly accelerated; in fact, it is bounded for all sufficiently large populations. We provide explicit bounds on the speed of convergence as a function of key structural parameters including the number of strategies, the length of the better reply paths, the extent to which players can influence the payoffs of others, and the desired degree of approximation to Nash equilibrium.     

Monotonicity and Implementability

Consider an environment with a finite number of alternatives, and agents with private values and quasilinear utility functions. A domain of valuation functions for an agent is a monotonicity domain if every finite‐valued monotone randomized allocation rule defined on it is implementable in dominant strategies. We fully characterize the set of all monotonicity domains.     

Terror and trade of individual investors

A great number of psychological studies document the influence of emotions on individuals’ decision-making processes. This paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the possible impact of terrorism on financial trade by individual investors. Using account data for over 3000 households obtained from a large Israeli bank, we look into reactions of common stock investments to terrorist incidents in the years 1998–2002. The empirical analysis indicates that terror has a significant adverse effect on actual trade, possibly limiting the scope of risk-sharing available through traded securities. Several psychological explanations for investors’ reluctance to trade are provided. Amongst them are the increase in public fear (resulting in pessimistic risk estimates and risk averse choices); the sense of ambiguity caused by terror; repercussions of anxiety and depression disorders; a desire to avoid future regret. Our results add to the recent literature documenting the harmful effects terrorist acts have on various facets of the economy.     

Quantifying Accidents: Cars,Statistics, and Unintended Consequences in the Construction of Social Problems Over Time

This paper investigates the potential effects of a single cultural means of claimsmaking—quantification—on the construction of a social problem through time. By analyzing salient historical uses of statistics in public debates on traffic accidents in the United States, the study seeks to advance the understanding of the role played by numerical claims in the broader dynamics of problem evolution and development. Specifically, key employments of numbers by early automobile clubs, the private insurance industry, safety movement and establishment, and printed media are closely traced and interrelated to flesh out their impacts on dominant representations of the issue over the long term. While numerical claimsmaking produced divergent, often contradictory effects on the construction of the problem, I argue that figures ultimately contributed to the gradual waning of the moralist and political zest that characterized much of the claimsmaking activities on the issue in the first half of the twentieth century. The argument provides one explanation of how traffic accidents can come to be defined in contemporary society as a “necessary evil”—a regrettable yet largely unalterable price to pay for the benefits of the automobile. To the extent that many of these quantification effects are unintended, they are linked to both the nature of statistical argumentation employed in this case and its institutional contexts.     

Manipulability in matching markets: conflict and coincidence of interests

We study comparative statics of manipulations by women in the men-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism in the two-sided one-to-one marriage market. We prove that if a group of women weakly successfully manipulates or employs truncation strategies, then all other women weakly benefit and all men are weakly harmed. We show that these results do not appropriately generalize to the many-to-one college admissions model.     

Characterizing Vickrey allocation rule by anonymity

We consider the problem of allocating finitely many units of an indivisible good among a group of agents when each agent receives at most one unit of the good and pays a non-negative price. For example, imagine that a government allocates a fixed number of licenses to private firms, or that it distributes equally divided lands to households. Anonymity in welfare is a condition of impartiality in the sense that it requires allocation rules to treat agents equally in welfare terms from the viewpoint of agents who are ignorant of their own valuations or identities. We show that the Vickrey allocation rule is the unique allocation rule satisfying strategy-proofness, anonymity in welfare, and individual rationality.     

Predicting Intentions to Report Administrative and Disciplinary Infractions: Applying the Reasoned Action Model

The present study focuses on the reporting ofadministrative and disciplinary irregularities. Thereasoned action model (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) isapplied to predict officers' intentions to report illegal or irregular activities in the IsraeliDefense Forces. The findings show that although themodel's two predictors (attitude toward reporting andsubjective norm) significantly predicted intention to report, the effect of subjective norm wasmuch stronger than the effect of the attitude component.In spite of the military's strong formal system andalthough social forces have great potential to impose the reporting norm on an organization'smembers, actual reporting does not meet expectations.The results are discussed in light of the organizationalculture that develops as the combat unit struggles to survive in an extremely turbulentenvironment.     

Auto thrill shows and destruction derbies, 1922–1965: establishing the cultural logic of the deliberate car crash in America

The profuse historiography on the automobile in America near completely overlooks the ubiquitous cultural practice of entertaining live audiences by deliberately crashing cars. This paper seeks to rectify some of this ongoing neglect by providing a socio-historical exploration into the origins of this unique genre. The planned automobile wreck’s birth is traced to the early 1920s and is situated contextually within an established tradition of disaster and destruction reenactments, key historical developments in the system of automobility, and the phenomenon of traffic accidents. By exposing the political economy behind this form of amusement and the dominant discourse surrounding it, the paper provides an explanation for how and why the deliberate demolition of such an iconic and celebrated technology was able to flourish in America.