Related papers: Statistical mechanics of voting
Maximum entropy principle identifies forces conjugated to observables and the thermodynamic relations between them, independent upon their underlying mechanistic details. For data about state distributions or transition statistics, the…
The voter model is a classical interacting particle system modelling how consensus is formed across a network. We analyse the time to consensus for the voter model when the underlying graph is a subcritical scale-free random graph.…
We formulate thermodynamics of economic systems in terms of an arbitrary probability distribution for a conserved economic quantity. As in statistical physics, thermodynamic macroeconomic variables emerge as the mean value of microeconomic…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
We show that models of opinion formation and dissemination in a community of individuals can be framed within stochastic thermodynamics from which we can build a nonequilibrium thermodynamics of opinion dynamics. This is accomplished by…
For a binary choice problem, the spatial coordination of decisions in an agent community is investigated both analytically and by means of stochastic computer simulations. The individual decisions are based on different local information…
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
We present an inverse method to construct large classes of chaotic invariant sets together with their exact statistics. The associated dynamical systems are characterized by a probability distribution and a two-form. While our emphasis is…
We consider different choice procedures such as scoring rules, rules, using majority relation, value function and tournament matrix, which are used in social and multi-criteria choice problems. We focus on the study of the properties that…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
On the basis of information theory, a new formalism of classical non-relativistic mechanics of a mass point is proposed. The particle trajectories of a general dynamical system defined on an (1+n)-dimensional smooth manifold are treated…
Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
I give a concise introduction to some essential concepts of statistical mechanics: 1. Probability theory (constrained distributions, concentration theorem, frequency estimation, hypothesis testing); 2. Macroscopic systems in equilibrium…
The majority game, modelling a system of heterogeneous agents trying to behave in a similar way, is introduced and studied using methods of statistical mechanics. The stationary states of the game are given by the (local) minima of a…
The striking fractal geometry of strange attractors underscores the generative nature of chaos: like probability distributions, chaotic systems can be repeatedly measured to produce arbitrarily-detailed information about the underlying…