Related papers: Diversity and Collective Action
The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural…
Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal have played a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. These good actions may not maximise the actor's payoff, but they maximise the other's payoff.…
How does temporally structured private and social information shape collective decisions? To address this question we consider a network of rational agents who independently accumulate private evidence that triggers a decision upon reaching…
We derive a class of macroscopic differential equations that describe collective adaptation, starting from a discrete-time stochastic microscopic model. The behavior of each agent is a dynamic balance between adaptation that locally…
Much research has been carried out to understand the emergence of cooperation in simulated social networks of competing individuals. Such research typically implements a population as a single connected network. Here we adopt a more…
Whether an idea, information, infection, or innovation diffuses throughout a society depends not only on the structure of the network of interactions, but also on the timing of those interactions. Recent studies have shown that diffusion…
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…
Motivated by the search for forms of distributed belief that do not collapse in the face of conflicting information, this paper introduces the notions of cautious and bold distributed belief. Both notions rely on maximally consistent…
Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…
Identifying and quantifying factors influencing human decision making remains an outstanding challenge, impacting the performance and predictability of social and technological systems. In many cases, system failures are traced to human…
Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct…
A local culture denotes a commonly shared behaviour within a cluster of firms. Similar to social norms or conventions, it is an emergent feature resulting from the firms' interaction in an economic network. To model these dynamics, we…
Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…
The spreading dynamics of an epidemic and the collective behavioral pattern of the population over which it spreads are deeply intertwined and the latter can critically shape the outcome of the former. Motivated by this, we design a…
Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks,…
We explore a paradox of collective action and certainty in science wherein the more scientists research together, the less that work contributes to the value of their collective certainty. When scientists address similar problems and share…
Collective intelligence, which aggregates the shared information from large crowds, is often negatively impacted by unreliable information sources with the low quality data. This becomes a barrier to the effective use of collective…
Identifying factors that affect human decision making and quantifying their influence remain essential and challenging tasks for the design and implementation of social and technological communication systems. We report results of a…
We demonstrate that individual behaviors directed at the attainment of distinctiveness can in fact produce complete social conformity. We thus offer an unexpected generative mechanism for this central social phenomenon. Specifically, we…
A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the…