Related papers: Instability of group formation through indirect re…

Monitoring with implicated punishment is common in human societies to avert freeriding on common goods. But is it effective in promoting public cooperation? We show that the introduction of monitoring and implicated punishment is indeed…

Configurational information is generated when three or more sources of variance interact. The variations not only disturb each other relationally, but by selecting upon each other, they are also positioned in a configuration. A…

According to the fundamental principle of evolutionary game theory, the more successful strategy in a population should spread. Hence, during a strategy imitation process a player compares its payoff value to the payoff value held by a…

We consider a class of models of opinion formation where the dissemination of individual opinions occurs through the spreading of local consensus and disagreement. We study the emergence of full collective consensus or maximal disagreement…

We study the problem of {\em impartial selection}, a topic that lies at the intersection of computational social choice and mechanism design. The goal is to select the most popular individual among a set of community members. The input can…

In the context of micro-finance, a group of individuals undertake business projects that may interfere with one another. A contagious default happens if one person's project failure leads to the default of another group member. In this…

Correlated equilibria enable a coordinator to influence the self-interested agents by recommending actions that no player has an incentive to deviate from. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on accurate knowledge of the…

We consider a decision aggregation problem with two experts who each make a binary recommendation after observing a private signal about an unknown binary world state. An agent, who does not know the joint information structure between…

Pairwise interactions between individuals are taken as fundamental drivers of collective behavior responsible for group cohesion and decision-making. While an individual directly influences only a few neighbors, over time indirect…

This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…

The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to…

We propose a minimal multi-agent model for the collective dynamics of opinion formation in the society, by modifying kinetic exchange dynamics studied in the context of income, money or wealth distributions in a society. This model has an…

Given an ensemble of autonomous agents and a task to achieve cooperatively, how much do the agents need to know about the state of the ensemble and about the task in order to achieve it? We introduce new methods to understand these aspects…

We prove existence and uniqueness of solutions, continuous dependence from the initial datum and stability with respect to the boundary condition in a class of initial--boundary value problems for systems of balance laws. The particular…

We investigate opinion dynamics in a fully-connected system, consisting of $n$ identical and anonymous agents, where one of the opinions (which is called correct) represents a piece of information to disseminate. In more detail, one source…

This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…

A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that social and cooperative behavior can be affected by cognitive and neurological factors, suggesting the existence of state-based decision-making mechanisms that may have emerged by…

Complex systems with global interactions tend to be stable if interactions between components are sufficiently homogeneous. In biological systems, which often have small copy numbers and interactions mediated by diffusing agents, noise and…

A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…

In our digital and connected societies, the development of social networks, online shopping, and reputation systems raises the question of how individuals use social information, and how it affects their decisions. We report experiments…