Related papers: Nobility and Stupidity: Modeling the Evolution of …
The friendship paradox refers to the sociological observation that, while the people's assessment of their own popularity is typically self-aggrandizing, in reality they are less popular than their friends. The generalized friendship…
The Axelrod model is a spatial stochastic model for the dynamics of cultures which, similarly to the voter model, includes social influence, but differs from the latter by also accounting for another social factor called homophily, the…
In the celebrated stable-matching problem, there are two sets of agents M and W, and the members of M only have preferences over the members of W and vice versa. It is usually assumed that each member of M and W is a single entity. However,…
Social discrimination seems to be a persistent phenomenon in many cultures. It is important to understand the mechanisms that lead people to judge others by the group to which they belong, rather than individual qualities. It was recently…
The ultimatum game has been a prominent paradigm in studying the evolution of fairness. It predicts that responders should accept any nonzero offer and proposers should offer the smallest possible amount according to orthodox game theory.…
Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…
In this work an opinion formation model with heterogeneous agents is proposed. Each agent is supposed to have different power of persuasion, and besides its own level of zealotry, that is, an individual willingness to being convinced by…
We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Workers in insect societies are sometimes observed to kill male eggs of other workers, a phenomenon known as worker policing. We perform a mathematical analysis of the evolutionary dynamics of policing. We investigate the selective forces…
The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those…
We consider an opinion dynamics model where, during random pair interactions, each agent modifies her opinions about both agents of the random pair and also about some other agents, chosen randomly. Moreover, each agent belongs to a single…
We investigate the behavioral patterns of a population of agents, each controlled by a simple biologically motivated neural network model, when they are set in competition against each other in the Minority Model of Challet and Zhang. We…
The preferential treatment of in-group members is widely observed. This study examines this phenomenon in the domain of cooperation in social dilemmas using evolutionary agent-based models that consider the role of partner selection. The…
In the stable marriage problem, a set of men and a set of women are given, each of whom has a strictly ordered preference list over the acceptable agents in the opposite class. A matching is called stable if it is not blocked by any pair of…
Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are…
This paper studies the evolution of social power in influence networks with stubborn individuals. Based on the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion dynamics and the reflected appraisal mechanism, two models are proposed over issue sequences and over a…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
In 2002, Serge Galam designed a model of a minority opinion spreading. The effect is expected to lead a conservative minority to prevail if the issue is discussed long enough. Here we analyze the marriage gap, i.e. the difference in voting…
In a recent article, I showed that in several academic disciplines in Italy, professors display a paucity of last names that cannot be explained by unbiased, random, hiring processes. I suggested that this scarcity of last names could be…