Madhura Pawar

In this PhD project, Madhura will explore the impacts of link-recommendation algorithms in cooperation and collective action dilemmas. Online platforms have been regarded as fundamental tools for collective action. These platforms were deemed as vital to trigger collective movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine. Collective action dilemmas can be formulated as games where success is achieved when a critical mass of individuals adopt the same cooperative action. These dilemmas have been extensively studied since the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics. Besides political movements, collective action is required to mitigate the impacts of pandemics (e.g., reach critical number of people wearing masks or vaccinating) or to prompt actions to mitigate climate change effects (e.g., reach a critical number of people supporting CO2 reduction or a transition towards cleaner energy). In this project, Madhura will formalize collective action dilemmas on networks and assess how they are impacted by link-recommendations typically used in online social media. We will use Evolutionary Game Theory and dilemmas such as the N-Person Stag-Hunt, Collective Risk Dilemma and N-Person Ultimatum games.