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Previous models of international conflict have suffered two shortfalls. They tended not to embody dynamic changes, focusing rather on static slices of behavior over time. These models have also been empirically evaluated in ways that…

Historical narratives are dominated by actions of powerful individuals as well as competitions for power. Characterizing the origins, types and competitive strength of different kinds of power may yield a scaffolding for understanding…

Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…

Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…

There is an increasing supply and demand for political advertising throughout the world. At the same time, societal threats, such as election interference by foreign governments and other bad actors, continues to be a pressing concern in…

We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…

We examine the effects of memory and different updating paradigms in a game-theoretic model of competitive learning, where agents are influenced in their choice of strategy by both the choices made by, and the consequent success rates of,…

There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…

Prescriptions, or actionable recommendations, are commonly generated across various fields to influence key outcomes such as improving public health, enhancing economic policies, or increasing business efficiency. While traditional…

Comprehending procedural text, e.g., a paragraph describing photosynthesis, requires modeling actions and the state changes they produce, so that questions about entities at different timepoints can be answered. Although several recent…

The emergence and decline of democratic systems worldwide raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of political change. Contrary to the idea of a stable endpoint of liberal democracy, recent backsliding towards less democratic…

Classical power index analysis considers the individual's ability to influence the aggregated group decision by changing its own vote, where all decisions and votes are assumed to be binary. In many practical applications we have more…

We are currently unable to specify human goals and societal values in a way that reliably directs AI behavior. Law-making and legal interpretation form a computational engine that converts opaque human values into legible directives. "Law…

The ability of Gaussian noise to induce ordered states in dynamical systems is here presented in an overview of the main stochastic mechanisms able to generate spatial patterns. These mechanisms involve: (i) a deterministic local dynamics…

The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such…

We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…

In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome,…

We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular, we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social psychology as it…

In modern society people are being exposed to numerous information, with some of them being frequently repeated or more disruptive than others. In this paper we use a model of opinion dynamics to study how this news impact the society. In…

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…