Related papers: The Evolution of Overconfidence
Human societies are organized and developed through collective cooperative behaviors, in which interactions between individuals are governed by the underlying social connections. It is well known that, based on the information in their…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
In numerous contexts, individuals may decide whether they take actions to mitigate the spread of disease, or not. Mitigating the spread of disease requires an individual to change their routine behaviours to benefit others, resulting in a…
I revisit the standard moral-hazard model, in which an agent's preference over contracts is rooted in costly effort choice. I characterise the behavioural content of the model in terms of empirically testable axioms, and show that the…
Binary decision-making process is ubiquitous in social life and is of vital significance in many real-world issues, ranging from public health to political campaigns. While continuous opinion evolution independent of discrete choice…
Large amounts of evidence suggest that trust levels in a country are an important determinant of its macroeconomic growth. In this paper, we investigate one channel through which trust might support economic performance: through the levels…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
Intuitively, unfamiliarity should lead to lack of confidence. In reality, current algorithms often make highly confident yet wrong predictions when faced with relevant but unfamiliar examples. A classifier we trained to recognize gender is…
The behaviour of individuals is a main actor in the control of the spread of a communicable disease and, in turn, the spread of an infectious disease can trigger behavioural changes in a population. Here, we study the emergence of the…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a…
The environment undergoes perpetual changes that are influenced by a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. Consequently, it exerts a substantial influence on an individual's physical and psychological state, directly or…
Trusting machine learning algorithms requires having confidence in their outputs. Confidence is typically interpreted in terms of model reliability, where a model is reliable if it produces a high proportion of correct outputs. However,…
Cooperation is widespread in human societies, but its maintenance at the group level remains puzzling if individuals benefit from not cooperating. Explanations of the maintenance of cooperation generally assume that cooperative and…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
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…