CSSSA - May Webinar

Milena Tsvetkova will present The Emergence of Inequality in Vitro and in Silico

From small communities to entire nations, inequality in wealth is one of the most pervasive and tenacious features of the social world. What causes inequality to emerge and persist? I will present two projects that investigate how the network structure and interaction rules can increase and maintain inequality under repeated social dilemmas and majority voting for redistribution in large groups. The projects combine empirical data from behavioral experiments and simulation results from agent-based models. In the first case, the model was employed to explain the empirical observations, and in the second – the model was used to generate testable predictions for the empirical research


Bio: Milena Tsvetkova is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and postdoctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute. In her research, she uses web-based experiments, agent-based modeling, network analysis, and machine learning on online data to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality. Her work has been sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation, published in high-impact disciplinary and general science journals such as New Media and Society, Nature Scientific Reports, and Science Advances, and covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science, among others.

Zoom Link: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83966780415?pwd=SjNGZjg1c3d2MVNvOW9RQStyVGN6Zz09