Related papers: The Matthew effect in empirical data

We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…

The spread of behavior in a society has two major features: the synergy of multiple spreaders and the dominance of hubs. While strong synergy is known to induce mixed-order transitions (MOTs) at percolation, the effects of hubs on the…

A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…

The spread of scientific knowledge depends on how researchers discover and cite previous work. The adoption of large language models (LLMs) in the scientific research process introduces a new layer to these citation practices. However, it…

The linear preferential attachment hypothesis has been shown to be quite successful to explain the existence of networks with power-law degree distributions. It is then quite important to determine if this mechanism is the consequence of a…

Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the…

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…

Hierarchy of social organization is a ubiquitous property of animal and human groups, linked to resource allocation, collective decisions, individual health, and even to social instability. Experimental evidence shows that both intrinsic…

This study investigates the emergence of power-law and other concentrated distributions through a feedback loop model in crowd interactions. Agents act by their response functions to observations and external forces, while observations…

We review and conceptualize recent advances in causal inference under network interference, drawing on a complex and diverse body of work that ranges from causal inference, statistical network analysis, economics, the health sciences, and…

We introduce a new model of competition on growing networks. This extends the preferential attachment model, with the key property that node choices evolve simultaneously with the network. When a new node joins the network, it chooses…

Large scale real-world network data such as social and information networks are ubiquitous. The study of such social and information networks seeks to find patterns and explain their emergence through tractable models. In most networks, and…

Pathogens can spread epidemically through populations. Beneficial contagions, such as viruses that enhance host survival or technological innovations that improve quality of life, also have the potential to spread epidemically. How do the…

To uncover the mechanisms underlying the collaborative production of knowledge, we investigate a very large online Question and Answer system that includes the question asking and answering activities of millions of users over five years.…

We study the detailed growth of a social networking site with full temporal information by examining the creation process of each friendship relation that can collectively lead to the macroscopic properties of the network. We first study…

Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…

Many real-world systems are profitably described as complex networks that grow over time. Preferential attachment and node fitness are two simple growth mechanisms that not only explain certain structural properties commonly observed in…

A stylized experiment, the public goods game, has taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to contribute more to shared resources than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing…

Wisdom of crowds refers to the phenomenon that the aggregate prediction or forecast of a group of individuals can be surprisingly more accurate than most individuals in the group, and sometimes - than any of the individuals comprising it.…

Mastering the dynamics of social influence requires separating, in a database of information propagation traces, the genuine causal processes from temporal correlation, i.e., homophily and other spurious causes. However, most studies to…