Скачать или смотреть Nicolas Saintier (Universidad de Buenos Aires) - Modelling of social phenomena I

Nicolas Saintier (Universidad de Buenos Aires) - Modelling of social phenomena (lecture 1 of 3)

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, modelling of social phenomena has received a great deal of attention from the physics and maths community. In these lectures we will study how simple microscopic interactions among individuals can lead to macroscopic consequences.

We will focus on opinion formation process: individuals of a population exchange their views about some topic (e.g. ‘are you against or in favor of vaccination’), slightly changing their mind after each discussion. A macrocopic tendency can then be observed as a result of these microscopic interactions. The main problem consists then in understanding the macroscopic phenomenon (the evolution in time of the distribution $f_t$ of opinion) from the microscopic rules of interactions.

We will see how to deduce an integro-differential equation for $f_t$, and then how we can approximate it by a partial differential equation. In some case we will end up with a 1st order PDE and see how we can solve it (with the difficulty that $f_t$ is a probability measure over the space of opinions !).

For more information go to http://mat.ufcg.edu.br/pdefromthesouth/