Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity

Complex systems are often characterized by large-scale hierarchical organizations. Whether the prominent elements, at the top of the hierarchy, share and control resources or avoid one another lies at the heart of a system's global…

We survey some recent developments on the mathematical modeling of opinion dynamics. After an introduction on opinion modeling through interacting multi-agent systems described by partial differential equations of kinetic type, we focus our…

The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…

We present a model of interacting multiple choices of opinions. At each step of the process, a listener is persuaded by his/her neighbour, the lobbyist, to modify his/her opinion on two different choices of event. Whether or not the…

We introduce a new setting where a population of agents, each modelled by a finite-state system, are controlled uniformly: the controller applies the same action to every agent. The framework is largely inspired by the control of a…

More and more processes governing our lives use in some part an automatic decision step, where -- based on a feature vector derived from an applicant -- an algorithm has the decision power over the final outcome. Here we present a simple…

In the Seat Arrangement problem the goal is to allocate agents to vertices in a graph such that the resulting arrangement is optimal or fair in some way. Examples include an arrangement that maximises utility or one where no agent envies…

In this paper we study the controllability of networked systems with static network topologies using tools from algebraic graph theory. Each agent in the network acts in a decentralized fashion by updating its state in accordance with a…

Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…

News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person…

In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…

We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities.…

We prove a general existence result in stochastic optimal control in discrete time where controls take values in conditional metric spaces, and depend on the current state and the information of past decisions through the evolution of a…

A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…

Data-based decisionmaking must account for the manipulation of data by agents who are aware of how decisions are being made and want to affect their allocations. We study a framework in which, due to such manipulation, data becomes less…

This paper is concerned with the problem of controlling a system of constrained dynamic subsystems in a way that balances the performance degradation of decentralized control with the practical cost of centralized control. We propose a…

I consider decision-making constrained by considerations of morality, rationality, or other virtues. The decision maker (DM) has a true preference over outcomes, but feels compelled to choose among outcomes that are top-ranked by some…

We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…

Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…