Related papers: Bourdieu Dynamics of Fields from a Modified Axelro…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
It is shown, that the Boltzmann-like equations allow the formulation of a very general model for behavioral changes. This model takes into account spontaneous (or externally induced) behavioral changes and behavioral changes by pair…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…
The diffusion of ideas is often closely connected to the creation and diffusion of knowledge and to the technological evolution of society. Because of this, knowledge creation, exchange and its subsequent transformation into innovations for…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
Civilization produces knowledge, which acts as the driving force of its development. A macro-model of civilization that accounts for the effect of knowledge production on population, energy consumption and environmental conditions is…
Understanding individual customers' sensitivities to prices, promotions, brands, and other marketing mix elements is fundamental to a wide swath of marketing problems. An important but understudied aspect of this problem is the dynamic…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
Polarization and unexpected correlations between opinions on diverse topics (including in politics, culture and consumer choices) are an object of sustained attention. However, numerous theoretical models do not seem to convincingly explain…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
Assessing quantitatively the state and dynamics of a social system is a very difficult problem. It is of great importance for both practical and theoretical reasons such as establishing the efficiency of social action programs, detecting…
The purpose of this paper is to present an idealized hypotheses-drawn model describing dynamics of variability in business and other social areas. A new construct is introduced called the Bayesian space of assessments to consider changes in…
The dynamical origin of opinion polarization in the real world is an interesting topic physical scientists may help to understand. To properly model the dynamics, the theory must be fully compatible with findings by social psychologists on…
Understanding how an individual changes its attitude, belief, and opinion due to other people's social influences is vital because of its wide implications. A core methodology that is used to study the change of attitude under social…
Monte Carlo simulations mix the opinion dynamics of Deffuant et al with the cultural transfer model of Axelrod, using ten discrete possible opinions on ten different themes. As Jacobmeier's simulations of the pure Deffuant case, people…
Food is an essential part of civilization, with a scope that ranges from the biological to the economic and cultural levels. Here we study the statistics of ingredients and recipes taken from Brazilian, British, French, and Medieval…
We present a mathematical framework (referred to as Context-driven Actualization of Potential, or CAP) for describing how entities change over time under the influence of a context. The approach facilitates comparison of change of state of…