Emergence of simple characteristics for heterogeneous complex social agents

Abstract

Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities having a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics may emerge from potentially much more complex agents is thus a natural question. It has been proposed recently in [E. Bertin, P. Jensen, C.R. Phys. 20, 329 (2019)] that some types of interactions among agents with many internal degrees of freedom may lead to a `simplification' of agents, which are then effectively described by a small number of internal degrees of freedom. Here, we generalize the model to account for agents intrinsic heterogeneity. We find two different simplification regimes, one dominated by interactions, where agents become simple and identical as in the homogeneous model, and one where agents remain strongly heterogeneous although effectively having simple characteristics.

Submitted to the special issue of Symmetry "30 years of Econophysics: Symmetry in Physics and Economics"