Social self-organization

More about the book

What principles hold our society together? This question is complex, especially in light of the 21st-century challenges, such as financial crises and globalization. Understanding how society functions and how to manage our future sustainably is urgent. This book offers initial insights into this ambitious goal, using simple models of social interactions to reveal surprising "macro-level" outcomes from individual "micro-level" behaviors. These interactions can lead to the formation of social conventions and cooperation, or, conversely, their sudden collapse, resulting in disasters like crowd tragedies or environmental crises. It critiques classical modeling approaches, such as representative agent models, which fail to capture the self-organization of social systems. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback effects in understanding social dynamics. The evolutionary modeling approach presented here effectively explains counterintuitive phenomena arising from these features. The chapters cover modeling strategies for socio-economic systems, experimental issues, and agent-based modeling, with applications in pedestrian dynamics, opinion formation, cooperation, conflict, and systemic risks in society and economics. Selected parts have been published in peer-reviewed journals.