Social Network Dynamics

Abstract

Making friends and enemies involves a transformation of social networks, of a kind that can be and has been studied in a number of paradigms, within social psychology and economics. In this talk I will be sketching some ideas for a logic-based approach. The central idea is that, since a social network is a relational structure, we can immediately define a class of operators for reasoning about transformations of the network. These operators induce a dynamical system, whose behavior can also be analyzed logically. I will also reflect on ways of representing network games more generally.