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From Individual Decisions to Collective Decisions Changing the World

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Decision Economics: Minds, Machines, and their Society (DECON 2020)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 990))

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Abstract

Decision making plays an important role in many situations. This applies both to individual decision making and collective decision making, although the scope of the consequences of a decision may be quite different for both cases. In the collective case a worldwide scale can be reached whereas in an individual situation often the scale is limited to personal life. Nevertheless, also collective decisions usually have a basis in decisions of individuals within a population. In this paper it is discussed how in certain cases individual decisions can indeed lead to collective decisions with a worldwide scope of consequences. Two mechanisms for this are considered in particular: influencer-driven social contagion within social networks and plasticity-driven evolution within biological populations.

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Correspondence to Jan Treur .

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Treur, J. (2021). From Individual Decisions to Collective Decisions Changing the World. In: Bucciarelli, E., Chen, SH., Corchado, J.M., Parra D., J. (eds) Decision Economics: Minds, Machines, and their Society. DECON 2020. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 990. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75583-6_20

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