This is a project in applied mathematics with Wynn C. Stirling, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Brigham Young University, USA. It builds on a platform for coordinating distributed control in AI-guided robots, launched in Wynn’s book Conditional Game Theory (Cambridge University Press 2012), to fundamental issues linking the sociology of networks with microeconomic games.

Sociologists study the spread of influence in human social networks. Economists use game theory to model the strategic signalling and screening of information in networks. Influence flow also involves networks, but it doesn’t behave like information flow. In real life, these two network phenomena always co-exist. In a sequence of papers and a book we’re busy writing, Wynn and I are building up a new mathematical approach, based on Markov chain convergence and equivalence, to combine them in a way that can guide empirical studies by sociologists and economists working together.