Collective decision-making on networked systems: From social networks to political decision-making

Abstract

Collective decision-making refers to a process in which the agents of a community exchange opinions to reach a common decision. It is often assumed that a collective decision is reached through collaboration among individuals. However, in many contexts, concerning for instance collective human behavior, it is more realistic to assume that the agents can collaborate or compete with each other. In this case, different types of collective behavior can be observed. This talk will focus on collective decision-making and will present a concrete example of political decision-making. I will present a nonlinear model for collective decision-making in a community of agents where both cooperative and antagonistic interactions coexist, represented as a signed interaction graph. The aim is to shed light on the role of frustration of the signed network (quantifying the amount of social tension in the network) in the decision-making process. A concrete example of the findings to the process of government formation in parliamentary democracies will be discussed.

Relevant publications

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84147-3

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11396

• https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae046