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Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians. While most studies of crowd behavior consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people…
Diffusion plays an important role in a wide variety of phenomena, from bacterial quorum sensing to the dynamics of traffic flow. While it generally tends to level out gradients and inhomogeneities, diffusion has nonetheless been shown to…
Cooperation is central to the organization of complex biological and social systems. Most theoretical models assume homogeneous environments; in reality, populations inhabit spatially varying landscapes in which the payoffs of cooperation…
A pressing challenge for coming decades is sustainable and just management of large-scale common-pool resources including the atmosphere, biodiversity and public services. This poses a difficult collective action problem because such…
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and the interaction structure among individuals profoundly shapes its emergence and evolution. In real-world scenarios, cooperation prevails in multi-group (higher-order) populations, beyond…
We are facing a common serious issue, infectious diseases, and trying to suppress the spreading of infection. We need less contact with each other to decrease the chance of infection, but this means loss of economic activity, as well. This…
We propose a model to represent the motility of social elements. The model is completely deterministic, possesses a small number of parameters, and exhibits a series of properties that are reminiscent of the behavior of comunities in…
Recent studies suggest that the emergence of cooperative behavior can be explained by generalized reciprocity, a behavioral mechanism based on the principle of "help anyone if helped by someone". In complex systems, the cooperative dynamics…
Infectious diseases often spread faster near their peak than would be predicted given early data on transmission. Despite the commonality of this phenomena, there are no known general mechanisms able to cause an exponentially spreading dis-…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
Shared resources enhance productivity yet at the same time provide channels for biological and digital contamination, turning physical or digital hygiene into a cooperation dilemma prone to free-riding. Here we introduce a game of…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
The spatial arrangement of individuals is thought to overcome the dilemma of cooperation: When cooperators engage in clusters they might share the benefit of cooperation while being more protected against non-cooperating individuals, which…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Stabilizing cooperation among self-interested individuals presents a fundamental challenge in evolutionary theory and social science. While classical models predict the dominance of defection in social dilemmas, empirical and theoretical…
Understanding the emergence of prosocial behaviours (e.g., cooperation and trust) among self-interested agents is an important problem in many disciplines. Network structure and institutional incentives (e.g., punishing antisocial agents)…
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…
Social norms are rules and standards of expected behavior that emerge in societies as a result of information exchange between agents. This paper studies the effects of emergent social norms on the performance of teams. We use the…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…