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Understanding cooperation in social systems is challenging because the ever-changing rules that govern societies interact with individual actions, resulting in intricate collective outcomes. In virtual-world experiments, we allowed people…
We consider a coupled Polya's urn scheme for social dynamics on networks. Agents hold continuum-valued opinions on a two-state issue and randomly converse with their neighbors on a graph, agreeing on one of the two states. The probability…
Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations…
In this survey we consider mathematical models and methods recently developed to control crowd dynamics, with particular emphasis on egressing pedestrians. We focus on two control strategies: The first one consists in using special agents,…
Distributed voting is a fundamental topic in distributed computing. In pull voting, in each step every vertex chooses a neighbour uniformly at random, and adopts its opinion. The voting is completed when all vertices hold the same opinion.…
We study binary opinion dynamics in a fully connected network of interacting agents. The agents are assumed to interact according to one of the following rules: (1) Voter rule: An updating agent simply copies the opinion of another randomly…
We consider the duration of discussions in face-to-face contacts and propose a stochastic model to describe it. It is based on the points of a Levy flight where the duration of each contact corresponds to the size of the clusters produced…
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…
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…
We generalize Galam's model of opinion spreading by introducing three competing choices. At each update, the population is randomly divided in groups of three agents, whose members adopt the opinion of the local majority. In the case of a…
Moving groups are routinely faced with a choice of different routes as part of their daily lives, such as choosing between exits from a building. Differences in moving speeds and environmental constraints often lead to individuals being…
Altruistic behaviour is disadvantageous for the individual while is advantageous for its group. If the target of the selection is the individual, one would expect the selection process to lead to populations formed by wholly homogeneous…
For a binary choice problem, the spatial coordination of decisions in an agent community is investigated both analytically and by means of stochastic computer simulations. The individual decisions are based on different local information…
Any collection can be ranked. Sports and games are common examples of ranked systems: players and teams are constantly ranked using different methods. The statistical properties of rankings have been studied for almost a century in a…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
We propose a simple stochastic model of market behavior. Dividing market participants into two groups: trend-followers and fundamentalists, we derive the general form of a stochastic equation of market dynamics. The model has two…
We consider random walks in dynamic random environments, with an environment generated by the time-reversal of a Markov process from the oriented percolation universality class. If the influence of the random medium on the walk is small in…
Motivated by the literature on opinion dynamics and evolutionary game theory, we propose a novel mathematical framework to model the intertwined coevolution of opinions and decision-making in a complex social system. In the proposed…
This paper proposes a systems approach to social sciences based on mathematical framework derived from a generalization of the mathematical kinetic theory and on theoretical tools of game theory. Social systems are modeled as a living…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…