Related papers: The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer

The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…

We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…

Synergies between evolutionary game theory and statistical physics have significantly improved our understanding of public cooperation in structured populations. Multiplex networks, in particular, provide the theoretical framework within…

This paper introduces a bilateral matching mechanism to explain why different populations have different levels of cooperation. The traditional game theory assumes that individuals can acquire their neighbor's information without cost after…

Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…

The spreading dynamics of an epidemic and the collective behavioral pattern of the population over which it spreads are deeply intertwined and the latter can critically shape the outcome of the former. Motivated by this, we design a…

Modeling human dynamics responsible for the formation and evolution of the so-called social networks - structures comprised of individuals or organizations and indicating connectivities existing in a community - is a topic recently…

Mechanistic and tractable mathematical models play a key role in understanding how social influence shapes public opinions. Recently, a weighted-median mechanism has been proposed as a new micro-foundation of opinion dynamics and validated…

Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural change. For decades, researchers in the social and natural…

Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…

We review the recent fast progress in statistical physics of evolving networks. Interest has focused mainly on the structural properties of random complex networks in communications, biology, social sciences and economics. A number of giant…

This paper studies a class of consensus dynamics where the interactions between agents are affected by a time-varying unknown scaling factor. This situation is encountered in the control of robotic fleets over a wireless network or in…

Social life clusters into groups held together by ties that also transmit information. When collective problems occur, group members use their ties to discuss what to do and to establish an agreement, to be reached quick enough to prevent…

We review the observations and the basic laws describing the essential aspects of collective motion -- being one of the most common and spectacular manifestation of coordinated behavior. Our aim is to provide a balanced discussion of the…

We understand the dynamics of the world around us as by associating pairs of events, where one event has some influence on the other. These pairs of events can be aggregated into a web of memories representing our understanding of an…

There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…

We study how a consensus emerges in a finite population of like-minded individuals who are asymmetrically informed about the realization of the true state of the world. Agents observe a private signal about the state and then start…

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…

Reputation-based cooperation on social networks offers a causal mechanism between graph properties and social trust. Recent papers on the `structural microfoundations` of the society used this insight to show how demographic processes, such…

Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to…