Related papers: Universal size effects for populations in group-ou…

In the present work we study the relationship between population allocation and the combined effects of urban size and energy consumption, for two given areas and through a major part of the twentieth century. Along these lines a general…

The effect of undecided agents is studied within populations in an opinion-forming dynamic, varying the number of undecided agents for different proportions of populations in a complete opinion-exchange network. The result is that the…

Different voters behave differently, different governments make different decisions, or different organizations are ruled differently. Many research questions important to political scientists concern choice behavior, which involves dealing…

Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…

We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…

The term "diffusion of responsibility'' refers to situations in which multiple agents share responsibility for an outcome, obscuring individual accountability. This paper examines this frequently undesirable phenomenon in the context of…

In this work, we investigate interactions that simultaneously order a system locally, while keeping it globally disordered. The study is done in the context of the emergence of diversity in opinion propagation models with interactions…

We consider combinatorial optimization problems defined over random ensembles, and study how solution cost increases when the optimal solution undergoes a small perturbation delta. For the minimum spanning tree, the increase in cost scales…

The objective of statistical physics is to understand macroscopic behavior of a many-body system from the interactions of the constituents of that system. When many-body systems reach critical states, simple universal and scaling behaviors…

In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…

The universal behaviour of the directed percolation universality class is well understood, both the critical scaling as well as finite size scaling. This article focuses on the block (finite size) scaling of the order parameter and its…

Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…

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…

Agents care not only about the outcomes of collective decisions but also about how decisions are made. In many cases, both the outcome and the procedure affect whether agents see a decision as legitimate, justifiable, or acceptable. We…

Voters from m disjoint constituencies (regions, federal states, etc.) are represented in an assembly which contains one delegate from each constituency and applies a weighted voting rule. All agents are assumed to have single-peaked…

Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…

Social dilemmas are central to human society. Depletion of natural resources, climate protection, security of energy supply, and workplace collaborations are all examples of social dilemmas. Since cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma…

A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…

We present the results of detailed numerical study of a model for the sharing and sorting of informations in a community consisting of a large number of agents. The information gathering takes place in a sequence of mutual bipartite…

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…