On the dynamics of social conflicts: looking for the Black Swan

TL;DR

This paper models social conflicts and the emergence of extreme, unpredictable events called Black Swans using kinetic theory and game-theoretical tools to analyze individual competition and political stances.

Contribution

It introduces a novel kinetic theory framework to study the early dynamics leading to extreme social conflicts and Black Swan events.

Findings

Identification of self-enhanced effects in social competition

Modeling of early-stage Black Swan dynamics

Insights into the interplay between wealth and political stances

Abstract

This paper deals with the modeling of social competition, possibly resulting in the onset of extreme conflicts. More precisely, we discuss models describing the interplay between individual competition for wealth distribution that, when coupled with political stances coming from support or opposition to a government, may give rise to strongly self-enhanced effects. The latter may be thought of as the early stages of massive, unpredictable events known as Black Swans, although no analysis of any fully-developed Black Swan is provided here. Our approach makes use of the framework of the kinetic theory for active particles, where nonlinear interactions among subjects are modeled according to game-theoretical tools.