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The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
One distinctive and pervasive aspect of social systems is the fact that they comprise several kinds of agents. Thus, in order to draw parallels with physical systems one is lead to consider binary (or multi-component) compounds. Recent…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
The global chaos caused by the 19 July 2024 technology meltdown highlights the need for a theory of what large-scale cohesive behaviors -- dangerous or desirable -- could suddenly emerge from future systems of interacting humans, machinery…
We present a detailed model of collaboration in communities of practice and we examine its dynamical consequences for the group as a whole. We establish the existence of a novel mechanism that allows the community to naturally adapt to…
We analyze a controlled price formation experiment in the laboratory that shows evidence for bubbles. We calibrate two models that demonstrate with high statistical significance that these laboratory bubbles have a tendency to grow faster…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
The concept of progress has characterized human society from millennia. However, this concept is elusive and too often given for certain. The goal of this paper is to suggest a general definition of human progress that satisfies, whenever…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…
Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks,…
Several examples of Cyber-physical human systems (CPHS) include real-time decisions from humans as a necessary building block for the successful performance of the overall system. Many of these decision-making problems necessitate an…
We investigate the phenomenon of diffusion in a countably infinite society of individuals interacting with their neighbors in a network. At a given time, each individual is either active or inactive. The diffusion is driven by two…
Human behaviour is dictated by past experiences via cumulative inertia (CI): the longer a certain behaviour has been going on, the less likely changes becomes. This is a well-known sociological phenomenon observed in employment, residence,…
The dynamics of technological, economic and social phenomena is controlled by how humans organize their daily tasks in response to both endogenous and exogenous stimulations. Queueing theory is believed to provide a generic answer to…
There is growing recognition that the network structures arising from interactions between different entities in physical, social and biological systems fundamentally alter the evolutionary outcomes. Previous paradigm exploring evolutionary…
Evolutionary game theory assumes that individuals maximize their benefits when choosing strategies. However, an alternative perspective proposes that individuals seek to maximize the benefits of others. To explore the relationship between…
The basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…
We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations…