Related papers: A Formal Sociologic Study of Free Will
Can we describe social systems quantitatively and predictively, when we know all the actions, interactions, and states of individuals? We interpret human societies as co-evolutionary systems of individuals and their interactions. Based on…
Perpetual voting was recently introduced as a framework for long-term collective decision making. In this framework, we consider a sequence of subsequent approval-based elections and try to achieve a fair overall outcome. To achieve…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
Rationality has been an intriguing topic for several decades. Even the scope of definition of rationality across different subjects varies. Several theories (e.g., game theory) initially evolved on the basis that agents (e.g., humans) are…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
We study three axioms in the model of constrained social choice under uncertainty where (i) agents have subjective expected utility preferences over acts and (ii) different states of nature have (possibly) different sets of available…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
We establish an equivalence between two seemingly different theories: one is the traditional axiomatisation of incomplete preferences on horse lotteries based on the mixture independence axiom; the other is the theory of desirable gambles…
A social system is considered whose agents choose between several alternatives of possible actions. The system is described by the fractions of agents preferring the corresponding alternatives. The agents interact with each other by…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Inspired by the theory of desirable gambles that is used to model uncertainty in the field of imprecise probabilities, I present a theory of desirable things. Its aim is to model a subject's beliefs about which things are desirable. What…