Related papers: Maximal modularity and the optimal size of parliam…
Most real-world networks are too large to be measured or studied directly and there is substantial interest in estimating global network properties from smaller sub-samples. One of the most important global properties is the number of…
Computational social choice and algorithmic decision theory offer rich aggregation theory but no comprehensive process for egalitarian self-governance: aggregation, deliberation, amendment, and consensus are each considered in isolation,…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
We study the community structure of networks representing voting on resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. We construct networks from the voting records of the separate annual sessions between 1946 and 2008 in three different…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
In this paper, we determine which non-random sampling of fixed size gives the best linear predictor of the sum of a finite spatial population. We employ different multiscale superpopulation models and use the minimum mean-squared error as…
We consider a hierarchically structured population in which the amount of resources an individual has access to is affected by individuals that are larger, and that the intake of resources by an individual only affects directly the growth…
We analyze a distributed information network in which each node has access to the information contained in a limited set of nodes (its neighborhood) at a given time. A collective computation is carried out in which each node calculates a…
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…
We are investigating a paradigm of instability in coalition forming among countries, which indeed is intrinsic to any collection of individual groups or other social aggregations. Coalitions among countries are formed by the respective…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
Maximum diversity problems arise in many practical settings from facility location to social networks, and constitute an important class of NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. There has been a growing interest in these problems…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
Maximum likelihood estimation furnishes powerful insights into voting theory, and the design of voting rules. However the MLE can usually be badly corrupted by a single outlying sample. This means that a single voter or a group of colluding…
A simple fragmentation model is introduced and analysed. We show that, under very general conditions, an effective power law for the mass distribution arises with realistic exponent. This exponent has a universal limit, but in practice the…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computing, in which $n$ agents with limited local state interact randomly, and cooperate to collectively compute global predicates. An extensive series of papers, across different communities,…
We generalize Condorcet's jury theorem (CJT) to socially connected populations in which agents revise discrete choices on a network in the presence of zealots. Free agents receive privately informative signals about the correct alternative…
How does the shape of a network change as its size increases? Although random graph models provide some expectations for such "scaling behaviors" in the structure of networks, relatively little is known about how empirical network structure…
In many networks, it is of great interest to identify "communities", unusually densely knit groups of individuals. Such communities often shed light on the function of the networks or underlying properties of the individuals. Recently,…