Review papers

In the last years, a number of review papers have been published. Each of them has its own focus. Below, we collected links to them.

• Castellano, C., Fortunato, S., & Loreto, V. (2009). Statistical physics of social dynamics. Reviews of Modern Physics, 81(2), 591-646.

  • The authors review the state of the art by focusing on a wide list of topics ranging from opinion, cultural and language dynamics to crowd behavior, hierarchy formation, human dynamics, social spreading. For each issue, they describe the dynamics model, and everything know about its behaviour.

• Flache, A., Mäs, M., Feliciani, T., Chattoe-Brown, E., Deffuant, G., Huet, S., & Lorenz, J. (2017). Models of social influence: towards the next frontiers. Jasss-the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 20(4).

  • This review paper is the result of the first attempts towards the ToRealSim project. The core message is that a large part of the literature can be categorized into three classes: models of positive influence, moderated positive influence, and negative influence. The paper discusses how these competing assumptions about social influence have been defended, and shows that they generate competing predictions about collective opinion dynamcics. In the second part, the paper lists core open questions.

• Friedkin, N. E., & Johnsen, E. C. (2011). Social Influence Network Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  • This book provides a great overview over the very rich theoretical and empirical work of Friedkin and Johnsen. It is a great example of how theoretical and empirical research can/should inform each other.

• Gabbay, M. (2019). Integrating Computational Modeling and Experiments: Toward a More Unified Theory of Social Influence. In Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems(pp. 279–310). Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  • Based on a review of the literature this paper advocates a better integration of formal modeling and laboratory experiments.

• Mason, W. A., Conrey, F. R., & Smith, E. R. (2007). Situating social influence processes: Dynamic, multidirectional flows of influence within social networks. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(3), 279–300.

  • This paper discusses social-influence models from a social psycjological perspective and makes recommendations for future research.

• Mastroeni, L., Vellucci, P., & Naldi, M. (2019) Agent-Based Models for Opinion Formation: a Bibliographic Survey. IEEE Access.

  • Unfortunately, this review covers only a small part of the literature, but it also provides some statistical analyses about when and where contributions were published.

• Grabisch, M., & Rusinowska, A. (2020). A Survey on Nonstrategic Models of Opinion Dynamics. Games, 11(4), 65.

  • Unlike, the other reviews listed above, this paper covers many contributions from the economics literature.