Related papers: Democratic Forking: Choosing Sides with Social Cho…
Often exhibiting hierarchical and overlapping structures, communities or modular groups are fundamental and complex in network science. One of the most exploited tools to detect the mesoscopic structure is synchronization. Several phenomena…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
We study the roles of social and individual learning on outcomes of the Minority Game model of a financial market. Social learning occurs via agents adopting the strategies of their neighbours within a social network, while individual…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
The notion of software ''fork'' has been shifting over time from the (negative) phenomenon of community disagreements that result in the creation of separate development lines and ultimately software products, to the (positive) practice of…
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…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
As the last few years have seen an increase in online hostility and polarization both, we need to move beyond the fack-checking reflex or the praise for better moderation on social networking sites (SNS) and investigate their impact on…
The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
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…