Related papers: Estimating achievement from fame
We revisit a foundational question in golf analytics: how important are the core components of performance--driving, approach play, and putting--in explaining success on the PGA Tour? Building on Mark Broadie's strokes gained analyses, we…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Citations are a key indicator of research impact but are shaped by factors beyond intrinsic research quality, including prestige, social networks, and thematic similarity. While the Matthew Effect explains how prestige accumulates and…
Online bibliographic databases have enabled new research through which bibliographic records are analyzed as data about science. Within these records, the acknowledgements sections of papers are often used to draw conclusions about funding…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
A planner aims to target individuals who exceed a threshold in a characteristic, such as wealth or ability. The individuals can rank their friends according to the characteristic. We study a strategy-proof mechanism for the planner to use…
The hot streak, loosely defined as winning begets more winnings, highlights a specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially higher than her typical performance. While widely debated in sports, gambling, and…
Quantifying success in science plays a key role in guiding funding allocations, recruitment decisions, and rewards. Recently, a significant amount of progresses have been made towards quantifying success in science. This lack of detailed…
A novel picture of the relative positions of countries in the world of science is offered through application of a two-dimensional mapping method which is based on quantity and quality indicators of the scientific production as…
Estimating the dependences between random variables, and ranking them accordingly, is a prevalent problem in machine learning. Pursuing frequentist and information-theoretic approaches, we first show that the p-value and the mutual…
Connections appear to be helpful in many contexts, such as obtaining a job, a promotion, a grant, a loan, or publishing a paper. This may be due either to favoritism or to information conveyed by connections. Attempts at identifying both…
In light of the power problems of statistical tests and undisciplined use of alpha-based statistics to compare models, this paper proposes a unified set of distance-based performance metrics, derived as the square root of the sum of squared…
This study deals with a fairly simply formulated problem -- how to estimate the number of people bearing the same full name in a large population. Estimation of name popularity can leverage personal name matching in databases and be of…
This paper considers the problem of inference after ranking. In our setting, we are interested in any population whose rank according to some random quantity, such as an estimated treatment effect, a measure of value-added, or benefit (net…
Citations are essential for recognizing scientific contributions, yet citation behavior is shaped by more than just relevance or quality. We analyzed approximately 255,000 refereed astronomy articles published between 2000 and 2025 to…
Rankings of people and items are at the heart of selection-making, match-making, and recommender systems, ranging from employment sites to sharing economy platforms. As ranking positions influence the amount of attention the ranked subjects…
Humans are routinely asked to evaluate the performance of other individuals, separating success from failure and affecting outcomes from science to education and sports. Yet, in many contexts, the metrics driving the human evaluation…
Scientific and technological progress is largely driven by firms in many domains, including artificial intelligence and vaccine development. However, we do not know yet whether the success of firms' research activities exhibits dynamic…
In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather…