Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 5: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics

SOE 5.1: Invited Talk

Monday, March 16, 2020, 15:00–15:45, HSZ 01

After more than two decades: The bounded confidence model reconsidered — •Rainer Hegselmann — Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Frankfurt, Germany

By usual academic standards, the bounded confidence model (BC model) is quite successful. It is often cited; to overlook all its extensions is hardly possible. I find that surprising. But the success is probably due to two factors. First, the definition of the model is extremely simple. The dynamics is basically driven by just one parameter. Second, it is often easy to modify the model such that it covers whatever one thinks is missing.

The talk will demonstrate that the definitional simplicity of the basic BC-model is deceptive. There are lots of counter-intuitive effects that usual simulation approaches (including my own) have overlooked for a long time. The effects, for the most part surprising non-monotonicities, are not completely understood until now.

I will then focus on a certain class of extensions. They introduce an external signal that is heard by some or all of the agents that exchange in an BC-process. The talk demonstrates the explanatory advantages of a methodological approach that substitutes random start distributions by their deterministic idealisations.