Social Self-Organization

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What principles hold our society together? This question is increasingly complex, especially given the social challenges of the 21st century, such as financial crises and globalization. Understanding how society operates and how to manage its future sustainably is urgent. This book offers initial insights into this goal through simple models of social interactions, revealing surprising macro-level outcomes from micro-level behaviors. These interactions can lead to the spontaneous formation of social conventions and cooperation, or their sudden collapse, resulting in disasters like crowd tragedies or environmental crises. Traditional modeling approaches, such as representative agent models, fall short in explaining the self-organization of social systems driven by individual interactions. Key factors like randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback are essential for understanding the emergence of social patterns and dynamics. Our evolutionary modeling approach effectively explains counter-intuitive phenomena arising from these elements. The chapters cover modeling strategies for socio-economic systems, experimental issues, and agent-based modeling, with applications in pedestrian dynamics, opinion formation, cooperation, conflict, systemic risks, and managing complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected sections have been previously published in peer-reviewed journals.