A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for social aggregation in which different clusters of individuals can merge according...

Many species of ants engage in social foraging in which traffic develops over pathways defined by pheromones or physical roads cleared through debris. Worker ants from the same colony have a common underlying evolutionary interest in their collective performance. Thus, ant traffic makes an...

Two different ways to model the diffusion of alternative choices within a population of individuals in the presence of social externalities are known in the literature. While Galam’s model of rumors spreading considers a majority rule for interactions in several groups, Schelling considers...

This paper analyses, models mathematically, and compares national voting behaviours across seven democratic countries that have a long term election history, focusing on re-election rates, leaders’ reputation with voters and the importance of friends’ and family influence. Based on the data,...

We consider the majority-vote dynamics where the noise parameter, associated with each spin on a two-dimensional square lattice, is a bimodally distributed random variable defined as q with probability (1−f) or zero with probability f, where 0≤f≤1 is the proportion of noiseless sites. We...

Crime is the result of a rational distinctive balance between the benefits and costs of an illegal act. This idea was proposed by Becker more than forty years ago (Becker (1968) [1]). In this paper, we simulate a simple artificial society, in which agents earn fixed wages and can augment (or...

We here present a fixed agents version of an original model of the emergence of hierarchies among social agents first introduced by Bonabeau et al. Having interactions occurring on a social network rather than among “walkers” does not drastically alter the dynamics. But it makes social...

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and...