Related papers: The Self-Organizing Society: A Grower's Guide
In physics, I noticed subjects not explained by formulas were often not studied, like how uncontrolled growth systems changed form. Weather, businesses, societies, environments, communities, cultures, groups, relationships, lives, and…
Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions, solving societal challenges while respecting the will of the people. New governance frameworks represent this as a social network rather…
We present computational and analytical results indicating that systems of driven entities with repulsive interactions tend to reach an optimal state associated with minimal interaction and minimal dissipation. Using concepts from…
Sustainable resource use in large societies requires social institutions that specify acceptable behavior and punish violators. Because mutual monitoring becomes prohibitively costly as populations grow, we examine whether sustainability…
In a market system, regulations are designed to prevent or rectify market failures that inhibit fair exchange, such as monopoly or transactions with hidden costs. Because regulations reduce profits to those possessing unfair advantage,…
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…
When biological communities use signaling structures for complex coordination, 'free-riders' emerge. The free-riding agents do not contribute to the community resources (signals), but exploit them. Most models of such 'selfish' behavior…
The paper studies the problem of steering multi-dimensional opinion in a social network. Assuming the society of desire consists of stubborn and regular agents, stubborn agents are considered as leaders who specify the desired opinion…
Cooperation is widespread in human societies, but its maintenance at the group level remains puzzling if individuals benefit from not cooperating. Explanations of the maintenance of cooperation generally assume that cooperative and…
All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts which must align with respect to system-level goals. Understanding the dynamics which facilitate or limit navigation of problem spaces by aligned parts thus…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
In this paper, we consider a population of individuals who have actions and opinions, which coevolve, mutually influencing one another on a complex network structure. In particular, we formulate a control problem for this social network, in…
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…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social change occurs when behaviors and institutions are interdependent. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…
After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics…
We apply measures of complexity, emergence and self-organization to an abstract city traffic model for comparing a traditional traffic coordination method with a self-organizing method in two scenarios: cyclic boundaries and non-orientable…