Diversity, mobility and cyclic competition in social and ecological systems

• Grant number: 13/12566-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: January 27, 2014
• End date: October 26, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - General Physics
• Principal Investigator: Carmen Pimentel Cintra Do Prado
• Grantee: André Martin Timpanaro
• Supervisor: Serge Galam
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 12/13308-0 - Diversity, mobility and cyclic competition in social and ecological systems, BP.PD

Abstract

The interest of physicists for interdisciplinary problems has grown in the last years, with techniques from traditional areas of physics being applied to problems in sociology, economy and biology, among others. In this project, we propose to study how models defined in networks, that tend to inhibit diversity locally (homogenizing the states of the agents), could sustain this same diversity in a global scale (keeping the spread of the homogenization from reaching the whole network). This problem arises in sociology, when explaining the persistence of different points of view in a society and in ecology, where it applies to many biodiversity situations. In this study, we intend to use as a foundation an original model for dealing with opinion coexistence and conflict (confidence rules), that we proposed during the doctorate, and the approach that we developed, capable of describing the qualitative dynamics of this model, applying them to the Sznajd model, to the voter model and to models based in game theory. More precisely, we intend to study the roled plated by the network, specially de small world property, as well as the role played by cyclic competition, for the maintenance of diversity in these models. (AU)