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A previously developed model that describes the dynamics of social tension in a society divided into two groups: the elite and the people was considered. This model took into account the impact of economic situation changes and the elite–people interaction. The model has been modified by including in the equation describing the tension of the people, a term that takes into account the adaptation of the people to the current situation.

The model coefficients estimation is an important task, the solution of which allows obtaining information about the nature of the interaction between elite and people. We believe that the solution of the system of model equations with optimal coefficients is closest to the values of the indicator characterizing social tension. We used the normalized level of homicide rate as an indicator of social tension.

The model contains seven coefficients. Two coefficients characterizing the influence of economic situation changes on elite and people are taken equal to each other and the same for all countries. We obtained their estimations using a simplified model that takes into account only the change in the economic situation and allows an analytical solution.

The Bayesian approach was used to estimate the remaining five coefficients of model for post-Soviet countries. The prior probability densities of the four coefficients for all countries under consideration were taken to be the same. The prior probability density of fifth coefficient was considered to depend on the regime of government (authoritarian or «transitional»). We assumed that the calculated tension matches with the corresponding indicator of tension in cases where the difference between them does not exceed 5%.

The calculations showed that for the post-Soviet countries, a good coincidence was obtained between the calculated values of the people tension and the normalized level of homicide rate. The coincidence is satisfactory only on average.

The following main results was obtained at the work: under the influence of some «significant» events in 40% of post-Soviet countries, there was a rapid change in the nature of interaction between the elite and the people; regional feature have some influence on the elite–people interaction; the type of government does not significantly affect the elite–people interaction; the method for assessing the stability of the country by the value of the model coefficients is proposed.

In this paper average times between elementary jumps of stock returns on the Russian market were experimentally studied. Considering the scaling of the probability density function of stock returns on different time intervals it is shown that an elementary jump in the random walks scheme for financial instrument returns is a unit price change (tick) that corresponds to a single deal on the stock market.

The most important principle of military science and border security is the principle of concentrating the main efforts on the main directions and tasks. At the tactical level, there are many mathematical models for computing the optimal resource allocation by directions and objects, whereas at the state level there are no corresponding models. Using the statistical data on the results of the protection of the US border, an exponential type border production function parameter is calculated that reflects the organizational and technological capabilities of the border guard. The production function determines the dependence of the probability of detaining offenders from the density of border guards per kilometer of the border. Financial indicators in the production function are not taken into account, as the border maintenance budget and border equipment correlate with the number of border agents. The objective function of the border guards is defined — the total prevented damage from detained violators taking into account their expected danger for the state and society, which is to be maximized. Using Slater's condition, the solution of the problem was found — optimal density of border guard was calculated for the regions of the state. Having a model of resource allocation, the example of the three border regions of the United States has also solved the reverse problem — threats in the regions have been assessed based on the known allocation of resources. The expected danger from an individual offender on the US-Canada border is 2–5 times higher than from an offender on the US-Mexican border. The results of the calculations are consistent with the views of US security experts: illegal migrants are mostly detained on the US-Mexican border, while potential terrorists prefer to use other channels of penetration into the US (including the US-Canadian border), where the risks of being detained are minimal. Also, the results of the calculations are consistent with the established practice of border protection: in 2013 the number of border guards outside the checkpoints on the US-Mexican border increased by 2 times compared with 2001, while on the American-Canadian border — 4 times. The practice of border protection and the views of specialists give grounds for approval of the verification of the model.

In the present article we explore the process of changing the level of approval of a political leader under the influence of the processes taking place in online platforms (social networks, forums, etc.). The driver of these changes is the interaction of users, through which they can exchange opinions with each other and formulate their position in relation to the political leader. In addition to interpersonal interaction, we will consider such factors as the information impact, expressed in the creation of an information flow with a given power and polarity (positive or negative, in the context of influencing the image of a political leader), as well as the presence of a group of agents (opinion leaders), supporting the leader, or, conversely, negatively affecting its representation in the media space.

The mathematical basis of the presented research is the Kirman model, which has its roots in biology and initially found its application in economics. Within the framework of this model it is considered that each user is in one of the two possible states, and a Markov jump process describing transitions between these states is given. For the problem under consideration, these states are 0 or 1, depending on whether a particular agent is a supporter of a political leader or not. For further research, we find its diffusional approximation, known as the Jacoby process. With the help of spectral decomposition for the infinitesimal operator of this process we have an opportunity to find an analytical representation for the transition probability density.

Analyzing the probabilities obtained in this way, we can assess the influence of individual factors of the model: the power and direction of the information flow, available to online users and relevant to the tasks of rating formation, as well as the number of supporters or opponents of the politician. Next, using the found eigenfunctions and eigenvalues, we derive expressions for the evaluation of conditional mathematical expectations of a politician’s rating, which can serve as a basis for building forecasts that are important for the formation of a strategy of representing a political leader in the online environment.

In some cases, information warfare results in almost whole population accepting one of two contesting points of view and rejecting the other. In other cases, however, the “majority party” gets only a small advantage over the “minority party”. The relevant question is which network characteristics of a population contribute to the minority being able to maintain some significant numbers. Given that some societies are more connected than others, in the sense that they have a higher density of social ties, this question is specified as follows: how does the density of social ties affect the chances of a minority to maintain a significant number? Does a higher density contribute to a landslide victory of majority, or to resistance of minority? To address this issue, we consider information warfare between two parties, called the Left and the Right, in the population, which is represented as a network, the nodes of which are individuals, and the connections correspond to their acquaintance and describe mutual influence. At each of the discrete points in time, each individual decides which party to support based on their attitude, i. e. predisposition to the Left or Right party and taking into account the influence of his network ties. The influence means here that each tie sends a cue with a certain probability to the individual in question in favor of the party that themselves currently support. If the tie switches their party affiliation, they begin to agitate the individual in question for their “new” party. Such processes create dynamics, i. e. the process of changing the partisanship of individuals. The duration of the warfare is exogenously set, with the final time point roughly associated with the election day. The described model is numerically implemented on a scale-free network. Numerical experiments have been carried out for various values of network density. Because of the presence of stochastic elements in the model, 200 runs were conducted for each density value, for each of which the final number of supporters of each of the parties was calculated. It is found that with higher density, the chances increase that the winner will cover almost the entire population. Conversely, low network density contributes to the chances of a minority to maintain significant numbers.

The question of distribution of citizens expenses in modern Russia is experimentally investigated. New cars were chosen as representative group of the acquired goods as well as earlier. Results of the analysis of sales of new cars for 2007–2009 are presented below. Main “body” of density of probability to find certain number of cars depending on their price, since some initial price up to ~ k$60, is an exponential distribution. The found feature of distribution (unlike 2003–2005) was an existence of minimum price. For expensive cars (distribution “tail”), the asymptotic form is the Pareto distribution with a hyperbole exponent a little greater, than measured earlier for 2003–2005. The results turned up to be similar to direct measurements of distribution of tax declarations on their size, submitted to the USA in 2004 where exponential distribution of the income of citizens, since some minimum, with some asymptotic in the form of Pareto's distribution also was observed.