Related papers: Quantitative and empirical demonstration of the Ma…
Herbert Simon's classic rich-get-richer model is one of the simplest empirically supported mechanisms capable of generating heavy-tail size distributions for complex systems. Simon argued analytically that a population of flavored elements…
The growing importance of citation-based bibliometric indicators in shaping the prospects of academic careers incentivizes scientists to boost the numbers of citations they receive. Whereas the exploitation of self-citations has been…
Publication statistics are ubiquitous in the ratings of scientific achievement, with citation counts and paper tallies factoring into an individual's consideration for postdoctoral positions, junior faculty, tenure, and even visa status for…
We study the consequences of job markets' heavy reliance on referrals. Referrals lead to more opportunities for workers to be hired, which lead to better matches and increased productivity, but also disadvantage job-seekers with few or no…
Track and field world records have risen and fallen throughout the history of the sport. A recent rash of record-breaking performances has prompted the question: "How good can we get?". This article offers a review of several attempts to…
The failure of landing a job for college students could cause serious social consequences such as drunkenness and suicide. In addition to academic performance, unconscious biases can become one key obstacle for hunting jobs for graduating…
The career of an employee can be described (under certain circumstances) by a random walk, where the states of the random walk are determined by the level and position of an employee. At each decision moment the state of the employee is…
This paper applies existing and new approaches to study trends in the performance of elite athletes over time. We study both track and field scores of men and women athletes on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2019, revealing several trends and…
In the present work, via computational simulation we study the statistical distribution of people versus number of steps acquired by them in a learning process, considering Darwin classical theory of evolution, i.e. competition, learning…
Understanding how a scientist develops new scientific collaborations or how their papers receive new citations is a major challenge in scientometrics. The approach being proposed simultaneously examines the growth processes of the…
Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong "first-mover" effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers…
People vary in their ability to make accurate predictions about the future. Prior studies have shown that some individuals can predict the outcome of future events with consistently better accuracy. This leads to a natural question: what…
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…
Classical rich-get-richer models have found much success in being able to broadly reproduce the statistics and dynamics of diverse real complex systems. These rich-get-richer models are based on classical urn models and unfold step-by-step…
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…
The rapid evolution of scientific research has been creating a huge volume of publications every year. Among the many quantification measures of scientific impact, citation count stands out for its frequent use in the research community.…
Smoking of tobacco is predicted to cause approximately six million deaths worldwide in 2014. Responding effectively to this epidemic requires a thorough understanding of how smoking behaviour is transmitted and modified. Here, we present a…
Some scientists are more likely to explore unfamiliar research topics while others tend to exploit existing ones. In previous work, correlations have been found between scientists' topic choices and their career performances. However,…
We study empirically how fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement or merit, measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average fame grows…
We consider tit-for-tat dynamics in production markets, where there is a set of $n$ players connected via a weighted graph. Each player $i$ can produce an eponymous good using its linear production function, given as input various amounts…