Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 11: Award Session: Young Scientist Award for Socio-and Econophysics (YSA)

SOE 11.2: Prize Talk

Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 15:00–15:45, H17

The Dynamics of Social Conventions: From Names to Cryptocurrencies — •Andrea Baronchelli — City, University of London (UK)

How do conventions emerge and evolve in complex decentralised social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as sociology, economics, cognitive science and network science. Various attempts to solve this puzzle pre-suppose that formal or informal institutions are needed to facilitate a solution. The complex systems and statistical physics approach, by contrast, hypotheses that such institutions are not necessary in order for social consensus to form. In this talk, I will discuss theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions and clarify how the properties of the social network control the dynamics of norm formation. Then, I will discuss how social norms change, showing how historical data and lab experiments indicate that abrupt transitions between competing norms do not require the intervention of a centralised authority. Finally, I will present some recent results on the modelling of the cryptocurrency market, where users conventionally attribute value to electronic tokens. Overall, these results clarify the processes of social coordination and collective behaviour change and can help better understand the dynamics of such phenomena in online and offline social media as well as aid the design of effective policies to foster desirable collective behavioural shifts, for example to contrast climate change.