Related papers: The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated…
Much research has been carried out to understand the emergence of cooperation in simulated social networks of competing individuals. Such research typically implements a population as a single connected network. Here we adopt a more…
Social contagion is a ubiquitous and fundamental process that drives individual and social changes. Although social contagion arises as a result of cognitive processes and biases, the integration of cognitive mechanisms with the theory of…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
Whether, and under what conditions, groups exhibit "crowd wisdom" has been a major focus of research across the social and computational sciences. Much of this work has focused on the role of social influence in promoting the wisdom of the…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
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…
In recent times there has been a surge of interest in seeking out patterns in the aggregate behavior of socio-economic systems. One such domain is the emergence of statistical regularities in the evolution of collective choice from…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
Human populations exhibit complex behaviors---characterized by long-range correlations and surges in activity---across a range of social, political, and technological contexts. Yet it remains unclear where these collective behaviors come…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Recent progress in the large scale mapping of social networks is opening new quantitative windows into the structure of human societies. These networks are largely the result of how we access and utilize information. Here I show that a…
This is an introduction to the special issue titled "Collective behavior and evolutionary games" that is in the making at Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The term collective behavior covers many different phenomena in nature and society. From…
Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Hierarchical networks are prevalent in nature and society, corresponding to groups of actors - animals, humans or even robots - organised according to a pyramidal structure with decision makers at the top and followers at the bottom. While…
We introduce a simple open-ended model that describes the emergence of a shared vocabulary. The ordering transition toward consensus is generated only by an agreement mechanism. This interaction defines a finite and small number of states,…