Related papers: The Electoral Consequences of Natural Disasters: A…
Natural disasters cause devastating damage to communities and infrastructure every year. Effective disaster response is hampered by the difficulty of accessing affected areas during and after events. Remote sensing has allowed us to monitor…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…
In modern society people are being exposed to numerous information, with some of them being frequently repeated or more disruptive than others. In this paper we use a model of opinion dynamics to study how this news impact the society. In…
Individual and community psychology plays an important role in disaster management as human behavior exhibit diverse risk perceptions, recognition of the threats that exists, positive and negative emotions, panic, anger, rumor, stress and…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
The frequency of disruptive and newly emerging threats (e.g. man-made attacks--cyber and physical attacks; extreme natural events--hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) has escalated dramatically in the last decade. Impacts of these events…
We consider stochastic growth models for populations organized in colonies and subject to uniform catastrophes. To assess population viability, we analyze scenarios in which individuals adopt dispersion strategies after catastrophic events.…
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…
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…
Natural disasters can cause substantial negative socio-economic impacts around the world, due to mortality, relocation, rates, and reconstruction decisions. Robotics has been successfully applied to identify and rescue victims during the…
This position paper discusses emerging behavioral, social, and economic dynamics related to the COVID-19 pandemic and puts particular emphasis on two emerging issues: First, delayed effects (or second strikes) of pandemics caused by dread…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
This review article provides an overview of recent work in the modeling and analysis of recurrent events arising in engineering, reliability, public health, biomedicine and other areas. Recurrent event modeling possesses unique facets…
Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
In bipartite causal inference with interference, interventional units might receive treatment or control, and they might affect the outcome of outcome units through their connections on a bipartite network. We study bipartite causal…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…