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It is widely believed that diversity arising from different skills enhances the performance of teams, and in particular, their ability to learn and innovate. However, diversity has also been associated with negative effects on the…

Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…

Group formation and coordination are fundamental characteristics of living systems, essential for performing tasks and ensuring survival. Interactions between individuals play a key role in group formation, and the impact of resource…

Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…

Most explanations of economic growth are based on knowledge spillovers, where the development of some technologies facilitates the enhancement of others. Empirical studies show that these spillovers can have a heterogeneous and rather…

In this work we present an analysis of a spatially non homogeneous ultimatum game. By considering different underlying topologies as substrates on top of which the game takes place we obtain nontrivial behaviors for the evolution of the…

The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…

In this work, we analyse the relationship between heterogeneity and cooperation. Previous investigations suggest that this relation is nontrivial, as some authors found that heterogeneity sustains cooperation, while others obtained…

Coordination games have been of interest to game theorists, economists, and ecologists for many years to study such problems as the emergence of local conventions and the evolution of cooperative behavior. Approaches for understanding the…

Game theory provides a mathematical framework for analysing strategic situations involving at least two players. Normal-form games model situations where the players simultaneously pick their moves. In this thesis we explore the strategic…

Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…

We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…

We investigate the dynamical systems modeling conflict processes between a pair of opponents. We assume that opponents are given on a common space by distributions (probability measures) having the similar or self-similar structure. Our…

A key challenge in complex design problems that permeate science and engineering is the need to balance design objectives for specific design elements or subsystems with global system objectives. Global objectives give rise to competing…

We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…

Competition networks are formed via adversarial interactions between actors. The Dynamic Competition Hypothesis predicts that influential actors in competition networks should have a large number of common out-neighbors with many other…

This publication reviews the framework of abstract competition, which is aimed at studying complex systems with competition in their generic form. Although the concept of abstract competition has been derived from a specific field -…

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…

We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…

Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…