Dr. Arezky Hernández: Tipping points and Complexity in the Majority Rule

The Majority Rule is a useful tool to model the behavior of agents in the society. It is accepted than in some situations people tends to imitate the behavior of the majority in its neighborhood. It has been found that when applying the Majority Rule in social simulations it produces a monotonic increment of people with certain behavior as a function of the amount of people with this behavior at the beginning. 

It will be shown that this results is only a particular case when regular networks are used. Instead, the Majority Rule presents a much more rich behavior and direct tipping points appear when irregular networks are used. Furthermore, it will be shown that the Majority Rule is also sensible to the behavior assumed for an agent when equal amount of its corresponding neighbors are found with opposed behaviors. When introducing another rule a contextual tipping point is found. 

In the present work, an extended characterization of the Majority Rule is done. The tipping points found are characterized with a developed measure of complexity based on information theory.

 

Place: Computer Science Department Seminar Room (412), 4th floor of IIMAS, Ciudad Universitaria

 

Date: 
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - 12:00 to 13:30