Authority is best defined as a relation that exists between individuals. A relation of authority exists when one individual, prompted by his or her circumstances, does as indicated by another individual what he or she would not do in the absence of such indication. This I will refer to as the authority relation. The legitimacy of an authority relation is what keeps the relationship from breakin...

Despite the large volume of societal interactions taking place on the Internet, it is still hard to assess the credibility of identity statements made by online users. The digital credentials issued by trustworthy certificate authorities partially address this problem, but a tedious registration and verification process as well as its high cost hinder the wide adoption of this solution. This pa...

Social law is perceived as evolving through the competition of individual social strategies held by the agents. A strategy with strong authority, accepted by many agents, will tend to diffuse to the remaining agents. The authority of a social strategy is determined by not only the number of but also the collective social positions of its overlaid agents. This paper presents a novel collective s...

The rational choice literature on religion has been noticeably silent on the nature and purpose of religious authority. I first summarize the rational choice theory of authority and offer a rational choice definition of religious authority. A primary insight is that (religious) authority exists to coordinate social action. I then argue that social coordination is a fundamental aspect of religio...

Social networks are graphs to represent social relationships. Social networks often change, but graph theory is based on static graphs. To deal with such dynamics we start from Searle‘s construction of social reality [4]. Example 1Game of Diplomacy game board: map with countries, armies of players moves: attack; collect taxes; invest social relation: power, fear, trust, alliance, ... Speech act...

Recent years have witnessed increased interests in measuring authority and modelling influence in social networks. For a long time, PageRank has been widely used for authority computation and has also been adopted as a solid baseline for evaluating social influence related applications. However, the connection between authority measurement and influence modelling is not clearly established. To ...

In this paper, we argue for social psychology as 'a science of movement'. We argue that such a science must problematise the status quo and focus on the way in which social stability as well as social change is actively produced. Key to this project is a recognition that human action arises in a context where multiple voices seek to mobilise people in different directions. The question of which...

A central characteristic of social networks is that it facilitates rapid dissemination of information between large groups of individuals. This paper will examine the problem of determination of information flow representatives, a small group of authoritative representatives to whom the dissemination of a piece of information leads to the maximum spread. Clearly, information flow is affected by...

Given a network of experts, we tackle the problem of finding a team of experts that covers a set of required skills in order to complete a project. Previous work ranks different teams based on the communication cost among the team members. However, it does not consider the effect of the authority of the experts. The authority of an expert is application dependent and might be related to the exp...