arXiv subjects

Ekaterina Landgren

Publications and source records attributed to Ekaterina Landgren.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Can homophily explain public underestimation of climate policy support?

Many climate change mitigation policies enjoy large majority support from the U.S. public. Yet, both Republicans and Democrats underestimate public support for climate policies, on average, with Republicans underestimating by more. Explaining this is a major puzzle in climate change politics. Homophily is one possible explanation: if citizens are selectively exposed to views reinforcing their own, then policy opponents might underestimate support more than supporters. Here, we explore how homophily could interact with social network structure to produce misperceptions of policy support, using a stochastic block model and preferential attachment model. Homophily alone can explain opponents underestimating support by more than supporters, but supporters only underestimate support when their homophily is so low that they disproportionately associate with opponents. We then expand our model to combine homophily with Bayesian rescaling, inaccurate priors, or asymmetric prominence of opposing opinions (simulating media bias). With Bayesian rescaling and inaccurate priors, homophily would still need to be highly asymmetric to produce realistic misperception patterns. Media bias combined with realistic, symmetric homophily can produce realistic misperception patterns in our model. However, empirical evidence on media bias in coverage of climate change policy is mixed. Our analyses provide theoretical foundations for advancing understanding of public opinion misperception, on climate change and other issues.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences

Academic publishing requires solving a collective coordination problem: among thousands of possible publication venues, which deserve a community's attention? A clear consensus helps scholars allocate attention, match submissions to appropriate outlets, and evaluate scholars for hiring and promotion. Yet preferences are not centrally coordinated--they emerge within each field over time. Here we ask whether all fields have arrived at similar solutions to this coordination problem, and whether preferences vary systematically with individual characteristics. Using an adaptive survey of 3,510 US tenure-track faculty yielding 163,002 pairwise comparisons across 8,044 venues, we show that fields occupy a wide spectrum of coordination. Economics, Chemistry, and Physics exhibit strong consensus, with respondents agreeing on elite venues and accurately predicting one another's choices. Computer Science and Engineering show fragmented preferences distributed across hundreds of outlets with minimal overlap. Within fields, preferences correlate with institutional prestige--faculty at elite institutions prefer higher-ranked venues--and with gender, as men prefer higher-ranked venues than women even after accounting for prestige and career stage. Scholars realize their personal preferences more successfully than their respective fields' consensus preferences, indicating that heterogeneity, not just selective hierarchy, shapes publishing outcomes. Journal Impact Factors explain only 64% of preference choices, systematically undervaluing what fields actually prefer. These results quantify how publication preferences vary across the structural diversity of academic fields.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Optimal ambition in business, politics and life

In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited search for strategies having uncertain rewards. At each time step, the searcher either is satisfied with their current reward or continues searching. We prove that the optimal satisfaction threshold is both finite and strictly larger than the mean of available rewards -- matching the folk wisdom. This result is robust to search costs, unless they are high enough to prohibit all search. We show that being too ambitious has a higher expected cost than being too cautious. We show that the optimal satisfaction threshold increases if the search time is longer, or if the reward distribution is rugged (i.e., has low autocorrelation) or left-skewed. The skewness result reveals counterintuitive contrasts between optimal ambition and optimal risk taking. We show that using upward social comparison to assess the reward landscape substantially harms expected performance. We show how these insights can be applied qualitatively to real-world settings, using examples from entrepreneurship, economic policy, political campaigns, online dating and college admissions. We discuss implications of several possible extensions of our model, including intelligent search, reward landscape uncertainty and risk aversion.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

A Shallow Water Model Exploration of Atmospheric Circulation on Sub-Neptunes: Effects of Radiative Forcing and Rotation Period

Sub-Neptune type exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy yet have no solar system analogs. They exist in a broad range of stellar forcing and rotational regimes that are distinctly different from solar system planets and more commonly studied hot Jupiters. Here we present simulations that explore global atmospheric circulation of sub-Neptunes generated with a two-dimensional shallow-water model, SWAMPE. We explore the circulation regimes of synchronously rotating sub-Neptunes with a focus on the interaction of planetary rotation rate and radiative timescale in a variety of stellar insolations. In highly irradiated, short-timescale regimes, our models exhibit high day-night geopotential contrasts. As the timescales become longer, the geopotential contrasts and longitudinal variability decrease, while temporal variability increases. The transition from day-to-night flow to jet-dominated flow is primarily driven by the radiative timescale. Strong- and medium-forcing regimes exhibit transitions between day-to-night flow and jet-dominated flow at similar points in the parameter space. Weak-forcing regime differs due to comparatively stronger rotational effects. Planetary rotation period dominates in determining equator-to-pole geopotential contrast. Our simulations exhibit higher time variability when either radiative timescale or rotation period is long.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2022

Comparison of Two Analytic Energy Balance Models Shows Stable Partial Ice Cover Possible for Any Obliquity

In this study, we compare two analytic energy balance models with explicit dependence on obliquity to study the likelihood of different stable ice configurations. We compare the results of models with different methods of heat transport and different insolation distributions. We show that stable partial ice cover is possible for any obliquity, provided the insolation distribution is sufficiently accurate. Additionally, we quantify the severity of the transition to the Snowball state as different model parameters are varied. In accordance with an earlier study, transitions to the Snowball state are more severe for higher values of the albedo contrast and energy transport across latitudes in both model; however, we find that the Snowball transition is not equally likely across both models. This work is general enough to apply to any rapidly rotating planet and could be used to study the likelihood of Snowball transitions on planets within the habitable region of other stars.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2021

How a minority can win: Undemocratic outcomes in a simple model of voter turnout

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote would not matter. Specifically, they do not vote if they feel sure their preferred candidate will win anyway (a condition we call complacency), or if they feel sure their candidate will lose anyway (a condition we call dejectedness). The voters reach these decisions based on a myopic assessment of their local network, which they take as a proxy for the entire electorate: voters know which candidate their neighbors prefer and they assume -- perhaps incorrectly -- that those neighbors will turn out to vote, so they themselves cast a vote if and only if it would produce a tie or a win for their preferred candidate in their local neighborhood. We explore various network structures and distributions of voter preferences and find that certain structures and parameter regimes favor undemocratic outcomes where a minority faction wins, especially when the locally preferred candidate is not representative of the electorate as a whole.

physics.soc-ph↗