Opinions, social tension, and rule learning

The five articles collected in this PhD thesis are separated into three independent parts: opinions (chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5), social tension (chapter 6), and rule learning (chapter 7). The first and second article (chapters 3 and 4) are game-theoretic analyses of the strategic behaviour of players that influence opinion dynamics in a social network. The third article (chapter 5) studies polarisation. The fourth article (chapter 6) studies a game with two players whose payoffs suffer multiplicatively from the inequality between them. The final article (chapter 7) develops a solution algorithm for a rule learning problem from bio-informatics.