HSD: An Analytic Framework for Political and Social Change: Conflict, Beliefs, and Dynamics

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The goal of this research is to create a unified systematic framework for understanding the dynamics of political and social change and use these ideas to understand the relationships between political systems and economic transformations. This project focuses upon generating mathematical models of social conflict and individual behavior and new theoretical tools to study the dynamics of belief formation and development in models of political change. The research consists of two components. First, the project provides new and more detailed modeling of the conditions under which political change leads to effective reforms. Second, the project produces a more complete framework that incorporates the formation and development of mass beliefs into a model that examines their impact on emerging political institutions. The study of complex dynamics of belief change necessitates the use and development of techniques from control and optimization theory. The approach in this project is to combine tools and ideas from these areas with economics, political science, game theory, networks, to produce a new framework for the systematic analysis of the dynamics of political change. The objective of the theoretical work is to provide qualitative analysis that generates insights into complex and dynamically changing political and social institutions and quantitative methods for decision makers that can provide tools for predictive analysis as well as the derivation of new policies.The proposed project has broader impacts through wide applicability of the models derived in this proposal to ones of production and competition, consumption, media effects, political campaigns, and corporate culture. The intention is to utilize these applications in providing a modeling platform that can address a wide range of settings. This proposal also has broader impacts in that it is multidisciplinary. Consequently, students participating in this project will gain a broad education in various fields in economics and mathematical system theory. The investigators also anticipate, as a byproduct of this research effort, developing multidisciplinary courses that demonstrate the power of dynamic systems analysis in applications involving political and social change. Such courses will be available on the Open-Course-Ware website at MIT. In addition to curriculum development, this project creates many opportunities for the involvement of undergraduate students in research projects. Finally, the investigators intend to continue close collaboration with several industrial partners and government research labs to enable a speedy technology transfer and utilize relations with the local schools in Cambridge (K-12) to help in advocating the power of mathematical modeling in solving real and important problems.