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

本研究的目标是创建一个统一的系统框架来理解政治和社会变革的动态，并利用这些思想来理解政治制度和经济转型之间的关系。该项目侧重于生成社会冲突和个人行为的数学模型，以及研究政治变革模型中信仰形成和发展的动态的新理论工具。本研究由两个部分组成。首先，该项目为政治变革导致有效改革的条件提供了新的、更详细的模型。其次，该项目产生了一个更完整的框架，将大众信仰的形成和发展纳入一个模型，研究它们对新兴政治制度的影响。信念变化的复杂动力学研究需要使用和发展来自控制和优化理论的技术。这个项目的方法是将这些领域的工具和思想与经济学、政治学、博弈论、网络结合起来，为系统分析政治变化的动态产生一个新的框架。理论工作的目标是提供定性分析，为复杂和动态变化的政治和社会制度提供见解，并为决策者提供定量方法，为预测分析和新政策的推导提供工具。通过将本提案中导出的模型广泛应用于生产与竞争、消费、媒体效应、政治运动和企业文化等方面，本项目具有更广泛的影响。目的是利用这些应用程序来提供一个可以处理各种设置的建模平台。该建议还具有更广泛的影响，因为它是多学科的。因此，参与该项目的学生将在经济学和数学系统理论的各个领域获得广泛的教育。作为这项研究工作的副产品，研究人员还期望开发多学科课程，展示动态系统分析在涉及政治和社会变革的应用中的力量。这些课程将在麻省理工学院的开放课程网站上提供。除了课程发展，这个项目为本科生参与研究项目创造了许多机会。最后，研究人员打算继续与几个工业伙伴和政府研究实验室密切合作，以实现快速的技术转移，并利用与剑桥当地学校（K-12）的关系，帮助提倡数学建模在解决实际和重要问题方面的力量。

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.