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Reproductive success and survival are influenced by wealth in human populations. Wealth is transmitted to offsprings and strategies of transmission vary over time and among populations, the main variation being how equally wealth is…
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
In a recent paper in this journal [J. Stat. Mech. (2009) P02037] we proposed a new, physically motivated, distribution function for modeling individual incomes having its roots in the framework of the k-generalized statistical mechanics.…
We report a method for estimating people's achievement based on their fame. Earlier we discovered (cond-mat/0310049) that fame of fighter pilot aces (measured as number of Google hits) grows exponentially with their achievement (number of…
Several tiers of social organization with varying economic and social disparities have been observed. However, a quantitative characterization of the types and the causal mechanisms for the transitions have hardly been explained. While…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.…
Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career…
Effective teamwork is essential in structured, performance-driven environments, from professional organizations to high-stakes competitive settings. As tasks grow more complex, achieving high performance requires not only technical…
In this article, I present a new approach and a novel model to the study of the life cycle of wages. The key idea is that wage can be thought as remuneration paid for the competency. It is assumed with the approach that there are three…
Ambition and risk-taking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop…
We investigate the accumulated wealth distribution by adopting evolutionary games taking place on scale-free networks. The system self-organizes to a critical Pareto distribution (1897) of wealth $P(m)\sim m^{-(v+1)}$ with $1.6 < v <2.0$…
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an…
This article describes what can happen when sustained effort and resources are devoted to creating a teacher professional support and development organization that puts teachers' needs first. Over the last ten years, Math for America Los…
This paper investigates the mechanisms underlying scientific stratification in the era of transition from elite to mass science. Existing scholarship has largely examined scientific stratification through the Matthew effect framework at the…
Stochastic multiplicative dynamics characterize many complex natural phenomena such as selection and mutation in evolving populations, and the generation and distribution of wealth within social systems. Population heterogeneity in…
For many public research organizations, funding creation of science and maximizing scientific output is of central interest. Typically, when evaluating scientific production for funding, citations are utilized as a proxy, although these are…
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and…
Existing studies on prejudice, which is important in multi-group dynamics in societies, focus on the social-psychological knowledge behind the processes involving prejudice and its propagation. We instead create a multi-agent framework that…
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in…