The most dramatic
event in "Robinson Crusoe", is the meeting with Friday, something
that radically changes Robinson's behaviour and perspectives; in
fact when we bargain, cooperate or fight with other human beings
we
are faced with problems entirely different from those we are facing
when alone against "nature".
We can distinguish two different social environments in which we may
act:
interactions with few agents (Games) and interactions with many agents
(Crowds). These are qualitatevily different.
In the first one the other agents are as rational as we are, we know
what their preferences are and we can weigh their statements; typical
instances may be a
chess or poker play, companies evaluating their optimal
behaviour, including bribing and collusion, before an auction of
government owned goods or bargaining before the election of the faculty
dean. Interactions of this type are studied in Game Theory, see below
or
here
for more
references on it.
In the second one we interact with a crowd of agents of which we know
very little and whose statements we are unable evaluate critically. The
outcome, observed since a long time, is that the collective behaviour
of crowds may be so irrational as to go against the
interests of
all agents forming it. Typical examples of crowd behaviour are outburst
of
riots, climactic moments in revolutions, reactions to political
campaigns or, more generally, the shaping of opinions via media or
Internet. In all these case the individual features of agents tend to
be less relevant than the net of relations between each other.
These nets, technically referred to as "social networks" exhibit common
features and can be studied with similar means in many different
contests.
In the lectures at Collegio Borromeo I will concentrate on the study of
this type of phenomena, that go beyond the field of interest of Game
Theory.
We will define the concept of social network and show some examples of
them ( such as the network of personal acquaintances, collaborations
between researchers or actors, Internet links etc.). Then we will study
their morphology and then what could be called their embryology, i.e.
how they are formed and grow.
Finally the way they they perform and how information spreads among
them will be investigated. The last lectures will be devoted to the
technical tools used to analyze them, i.e. the theory of random graphs
and some rudiments of statistical physics.
Some classical texts
Condorcet,
M. de, "
Essai sur l'application
de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions
rendues à la pluralité des voix" ,Paris, 1785.
Interesting comments are here: (references pointed by Valeria Ottonelli)
B.
Grofman and S. L. Feld,
“Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective.”
American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 1988),
pp. 567-76.
D. M. Estlund, J.Waldron, B. Grofman
and S. L. Feld,
“Democratic Theory and the Public
Interest: Condorcet and Rousseau
Revisited."
American Political Science Review/, Vol. 83, No. 4.(Dec.,1989),
pp. 1317-1340.
Elias Canetti: "
Masse und Macht",
Frankfurt, 1995.
Trad. It "
Massa e potere",
Milano, 1981.
Engl.Transl. "
Crowds and Power",
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
G. Le Bon: "
Psycologie des Foules",
1895
available on
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/le_bon_gustave/le_bon_gustave.html
Engl. Transl. "
The crowd",
Dover Publications, 2002.
G.Tarde: "
L'opinion et la
foule", Paris, PUF, 1989.
available on
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/tarde_gabriel/tarde_gabriel.html.
S.Freud: "
Massenpsychologie
und Ich-Analyse / Die Zukunft einer Illusion." ,Fischer,
Frankfurt.
W. McDougall,
"An Introduction to Social Psychology", 1906,
available
here
Granovetter: "
The Strength of
Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology, 78 (May): 1360-1380.
available on
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/faculty/granovetter/documents/TheStrengthofWeakTies.pdf
On strategic interactions
G. Giraud : "
La theorie des jeux
" Flammarion, 2000.
K. Ritzberger: "
Foundations of
Non-Cooperative Game Theory", Oxford University Press.
J. Weibull: "
Evolutionary Game Theory",
MIT Press.
B. Sandholm, "Deterministic
Evolutionary Dynamics". Forthcoming, The New Palgrave
Dictionary of Economics , 2nd edition.
Available
on http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~whs/research/ded.pdf
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