Related papers: Statistical mechanics of voting
A procedure to characterize chaotic dynamical systems with concepts of complex networks is pursued, in which a dynamical system is mapped onto a network. The nodes represent the regions of space visited by the system, while edges represent…
Physical systems behave according to their underlying dynamical equations which, in turn, can be identified from experimental data. Explaining data requires selecting mathematical models that best capture the data regularities. Identifying…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…
We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case…
We present a new strategic voting model where we use uncertainty representation to model preferences. Specifically, we use probability sets as uncertainty representations, together with lower and upper expected utility gains to take…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a…
A classical particle system coupled with a thermostat driven by an external constant force reaches its steady state when the ensemble-averaged drift velocity does not vary with time. The statistical mechanics of such a system is derived…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
We discuss here the use of generalized forms of entropy, taken as information measures, to characterize phase transitions and critical behavior in thermodynamic systems. Our study is based on geometric considerations pertaining to the space…
In this paper we consider the modeling of opinion dynamics over time dependent large scale networks. A kinetic description of the agents' distribution over the evolving network is considered which combines an opinion update based on binary…
By the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem, every reasonable voting rule for three or more alternatives is susceptible to manipulation: there exist elections where one or more voters can change the election outcome in their favour by…
A probabilistic framework is proposed for the optimization of efficient switched control strategies for physical systems dominated by stochastic excitation. In this framework, the equation for the state trajectory is replaced with an…
Thermodynamics and its quantum counterpart are traditionally described with statistical ensembles. Canonical typicality has related statistical mechanics for a system to ensembles of global energy eigen- states of system and its environment…
The models of statistical physics used to study collective phenomena in some interdisciplinary contexts, such as social dynamics and opinion spreading, do not consider the effects of the memory on individual decision processes. On the…
Symbolic dynamics has proven to be an invaluable tool in analyzing the mechanisms that lead to unpredictability and random behavior in nonlinear dynamical systems. Surprisingly, a discrete partition of continuous state space can produce a…
Entropic dynamics is a framework in which the laws of dynamics are derived as an application of entropic methods of inference. Its successes include the derivation of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory from probabilistic principles.…
Formalism based on equilibrium statistical thermodynamics is applied to communication networks of decision making individuals. It is shown that in statistical ensembles for choice models, properly defined disutility can play the same role…
Entropic dynamics, a program that aims at deriving the laws of physics from standard probabilistic and entropic rules for processing information, is developed further. We calculate the probability for an arbitrary path followed by a system…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…