Related papers: Solving Society's Big Ills, A Small Step
We increasingly depend on a variety of data-driven algorithmic systems to assist us in many aspects of life. Search engines and recommender systems amongst others are used as sources of information and to help us in making all sort of…
Typically, for analysing and modelling social phenomena, networks are a convenient framework that allows for the representation of the interconnectivity of individuals. These networks are often considered transmission structures for…
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose…
Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the…
Borgs et al. [2016] investigated essential requirements for communities in preference networks. They defined six axioms on community functions, i.e., community detection rules. Though having elegant properties, the practicality of this…
Clearly, socio-economic freedom requires some extent of transparency regarding the implications of choices. In this paper, we review some established mechanisms for achieving such transparency, without any claim to completeness, and briefly…
We focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. We model social norms to emerge from interactions…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
Optimization is widely used for decision making across various domains, valued for its ability to improve efficiency. However, poor implementation practices can lead to unintended consequences, particularly in socioeconomic contexts where…
This paper proposes self-organization as a method to improve the efficiency and adaptability of bureaucracies and similar social systems. Bureaucracies are described as networks of agents, where the main design principle is to reduce local…
We propose a categorical framework to reason about scientific explanations: descriptions of a phenomenon meant to translate it into simpler terms, or into a context that has been already understood. Our motivating examples come from systems…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare and civil defence are the result of designs and realizations that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are…
We present a novel methodology for identifying public knowledge and eliminating the biases it creates when aggregating information in small group settings. A two stage mechanism consisting of an information market and a coordination game is…
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…
The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
Advances in science are being sought in newly available opportunities to collect massive quantities of data about complex systems. While key advances are being made in detailed mapping of systems, how to relate this data to solving many of…
The small-world phenomenon has been already the subject of a huge variety of papers, showing its appeareance in a variety of systems. However, some big holes still remain to be filled, as the commonly adopted mathematical formulation…
To make models more understandable and correctable, I propose that the PROMISE community pivots to the problem of model review. Over the years, there have been many reports that very simple models can perform exceptionally well. Yet, where…