Related papers: Modeling society with a responsible elite

We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…

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…

Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

Taking a decision in democratic social groups is based on the opinion of the majority or on the consensus. So, the study of opinion dynamics is of great interest in analyzing social phenomena. Among the different models of opinion dynamics,…

We propose a stochastic model of evolution of wealth in a society of economic agents. In the model, an agent can be in two states: inactive and active. Transitions between the states occur at random time intervals. In the active state, the…

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…

As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…

We introduce and discuss kinetic models describing the influence of the competence in the evolution of decisions in a multi-agent system. The original exchange mechanism, which is based on the human tendency to compromise and change opinion…

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 propose a modified Vicsek-like model to study influence dynamics and opinion formation in social networks. We work on the premise that opinions of members of a group may be considered to be analogous to the direction of motion of a…

Human social behavior is influenced by individual differences in social preferences. Social value orientation (SVO) is a measurable personality trait which indicates the relative importance an individual places on their own and on others'…

In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…

Social trends or fashions are spontaneous collective decisions made by large portions of a community, often without an apparent good reason. The spontaneous formation of trends provides a well documented mechanism for the spread of…

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…

We introduce and discuss a system of one-dimensional kinetic equations describing the influence of higher education in the social stratification of a multi-agent society. The system is obtained by coupling a model for knowledge formation…

An evolving population, in which individual members (`agents') adapt their behaviour according to past experience, is of central importance to many disciplines. Because of their limited knowledge and capabilities, agents are forced to make…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…

As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…