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We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
Nowadays, in societies threatened by atomization, selfishness, short-term thinking, and alienation from political life, there is a renewed debate about classical questions concerning the quality of democratic decision-making. In this work a…
A population of heterogenous agents compeeting through a minority rule is investigated. Agents which frequently loose are selected for evolution by changing their strategies. The stationary composition of the population resulting for this…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
With the increasing pervasiveness of algorithms across industry and government, a growing body of work has grappled with how to understand their societal impact and ethical implications. Various methods have been used at different stages of…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the joint rewards…
Organizational growth processes have consistently been shown to exhibit a fatter-than-Gaussian growth-rate distribution in a variety of settings. Long periods of relatively small changes are interrupted by sudden changes in all size scales.…
The population protocol model describes collections of distributed agents that interact in pairs to solve a common task. We consider a dynamic variant of this prominent model, where we assume that an adversary may change the population size…
We found that models of evolving random networks exhibit dynamic scaling similar to scaling of growing surfaces. It is demonstrated by numerical simulations of two variants of the model in which nodes are added as well as removed [Phys.…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
The models of statistical physics used to study collective phenomena in some interdisciplinary contexts, such as social dynamics and opinion spreading, do not consider the effects of the memory on individual decision processes. On the…
We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case…
We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular, we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social psychology as it…
We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…