Related papers: To how many politicians should government be left?
Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
We propose and study a stochastic binary opinion model where agents in a group are considered to hold an opinion of 0 or 1 at each moment. An agent in the group updates his/her opinion based on the group's opinion configuration and his/her…
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…
In many circumstances there is a trade off between the number of voters and the time they can be given before having to make a decision since both aspects are costly. An example is the hiring of a committee with a fixed salary budget: more…
Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…
This paper examines whether there is a premium in country size. We study whether there are significant gains from being a small or a large country in terms of certain socioeconomic indicators and how large this premium is. Using panel data…
Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions, solving societal challenges while respecting the will of the people. New governance frameworks represent this as a social network rather…
Information transparency is a major building block of responsible governments. We explored factors influencing the information transparency of 117 world nations. After controlling for the effects of confounding variables of wealth (GDP per…
We investigate a dynamical model of opinion formation in which an individual's opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of other agents. We introduce a bias towards one of the opinions in a manner not considered earlier to the…
In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity and…
Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
We formulate three famous, descriptive essays of C.N. Parkinson on bureaucratic inefficiency in a quantifiable and dynamical socio-physical framework. In the first model we show how the use of recent opinion formation models for small…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
We introduce a 2-state opinion dynamics model where agents evolve by majority rule. In each update, a group of agents is specified whose members then all adopt the local majority state. In the mean-field limit, where a group consists of…
We recently proposed a model coupling the evolution of the opinions of the individual with the local network topology. The opinion dynamics is based on the Bounded Confidence model. The social networks is based on a group concept where each…
In this work, it is pointed out that in the mean-field version of majority-rule opinion dynamics, the dependence of the consensus time on the population size exhibits two regimes. This is determined by the size distribution of the groups…