Building Back Better: Modeling Decentralized Recovery in Sociotechnical Systems Using Strategic Network Dynamics

When a sociotechnical system is disrupted, recovery is usually modeled top-down — but in reality the agents at the bottom re-form the network themselves. This paper develops a computational framework based on strategic network formation, extended to allow fluid structural shifts, that models decentralized multi-agent recovery and quantifies how much of overall resilience it accounts for.

The result is both a prescriptive insight — bottom-up reconfiguration matters substantially — and a tool for comparing interventions that work with the agents rather than around them.