Related papers: Escalation dynamics and the severity of wars
We introduce cluster dynamical models of conflicts in which only the largest cluster can be involved in an action. This mimics the situations in which an attack is planned by a central body, and the largest attack force is used. We study…
Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…
We are able to unify various disparate claims and results in the literature, that stand in the way of a unified description and understanding of human conflict. First, we provide a reconciliation of the numerically different exponent values…
During intergroup confrontations, agitating stimuli such as opponents' threats and provocations can trigger collective violence, even without the usual mechanisms of ingroup cooperation, such as norms with sanctions. We examine video…
Previous models of international conflict have suffered two shortfalls. They tended not to embody dynamic changes, focusing rather on static slices of behavior over time. These models have also been empirically evaluated in ways that…
The increasing number of crimes in areas with large concentrations of people have made cities one of the main sources of violence. Understanding characteristics of how crime rate expands and its relations with the cities size goes beyond an…
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its…
The assumption that complex systems function optimally at the edge of chaos seems applicable to the international system as well. In this paper I argue that the normal chaotic war dynamic of the European international system (1495-1945) was…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
We consider a general class of three--state models where individuals hold one of two opposite opinions, or are neutral, and exchange opinions in generic pairwise interactions. We show that when opinions spread in a population where a…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…
I study how political bias and audience costs impose domestic institutional constraints that affect states' capacity to reach peaceful agreements during crises. With a mechanism design approach, I show that the existence of peaceful…
We study the growth dynamics of the size of manufacturing firms considering competition and normal distribution of competency. We start with the fact that all components of the system struggle with each other for growth as happened in real…
Decades of research has found that democratic dyads rarely exhibit violent tendencies, making the democratic peace arguably the principal finding of Peace Science. However, the democratic peace rests upon a dyadic understanding of conflict.…
Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…
Modern societies face the challenge that the time scale of opinion formation is continuously accelerating in contrast to the time scale of political decision making. With the latter remaining of the order of the election cycle we examine…
We analyze the evolution of political organizations using a model in which agents change their opinions via two competing mechanisms. Two agents may interact and reach consensus, and additionally, individual agents may spontaneously change…
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…
The dynamics of many social, technological and economic phenomena are driven by individual human actions, turning the quantitative understanding of human behavior into a central question of modern science. Current models of human dynamics,…