Approximate Sampling for Doubly-intractable Distributions and Modeling Choice Interdependence in a Social Network

Foremost, I owe my deepest gratitude to my co-advisors Prof. Yves Atchade ́ and Prof. Anocha Aribarg for their continuous guidance and support during my doctoral study. I’m grateful for their inspiration, encouragement, patience, and enormous knowledge, without which this thesis would not have been possible. I would like to thank the rest of my committee members: Prof. George Michai-lidis, Prof. Kerby Shedden and Prof. Peter Lenk, for their insightful comments. My thanks also go to Stefan Witwicki for programming the survey and raffle websites. It is his hard work that made our field experiment feasible. I wish to show my gratitude to Dr. Brenda Gunderson, Prof. Edward Rothman, and Prof. Ji Zhu for offering teaching and research assistant opportunities. I’m indebted to my fellow student colleagues in the Department of Statistics and colleagues at Center for Statistical Consultation and Research, for stimulating discussions and all the fun we had together. I’m especially thankful to Yang Yang