Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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A Model for the Collective Behavior of Interacting Socio-Economical Agents

Speaker: Micaela Fedele

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, September 20, 2013, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in studying socio-economical phenomena on solid mathematical grounds. Abrupt shifts of behavior observed in society (strongly reminiscent of phase transitions) and the emphasis on the role played by social interaction in shaping individuals preferences suggest that the Statistical Mechanics formalism may be a useful language to analyze socio-economical phenomena. A first attempt towards the description of the collective behavior of interacting agents by starting from their individual choices is represented by the multi-species mean field model: an extension of the Curie-Weiss model of ferromagnetism in which particles (agents) are divided into a partition of an arbitrary number of homogeneous sets of different sizes and interact with (influence) each other in different ways only depending on the set they belong to. I will describe in details the model and explain why it can contribute to a better understanding of socio-economical phenomena.