社会引力定律追根溯源

在交通出行、人口迁移、商品贸易、信息流通、社会交往、科研合作等大量人、物、信息的空间流动现象中,都存在类似万有引力定律的规律,即两地之间的某种流动量与两地活力的乘积成正比、与两地距离的幂成反比.类比万有引力定律建立的引力模型也在交通出行分布预测、人口迁移量预测、地区间贸易量预测等诸多方面获得了广泛应用.但复杂的社会系统中为何会有这样简单的引力定律存在?这是个非常有趣也有价值的问题.本文对从统计物理学、微观经济学和博弈论等不同视角探索社会引力定律根源的研究进行了综述.

Exploring the roots of social gravity law

Many spatial mobility of people, goods and information, such as human travel, population migration,commodity trade, information communication, social interaction and scientific cooperation, follow a law similar to Newton’ s law of universal gravitation. This law, named social gravity law, is that the flow between two locations is directly proportional to the product of the vitality of these two locations, and inversely proportional to a power function of their distance. The gravity model established by analogy with the gravity law has also been widely used to predict trip distribution, population migration, interregional trade flows, etc. But why do many complex social systems have such a simple law? It is an interesting and valuable issue. This paper reviews the research on exploring the roots of the social gravity law from various perspectives, including statistical physics, microeconomics, and game theory.