Related papers: Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success …
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
We introduce a minimal agent-based model to qualitatively conceptualize the allocation of limited wealth among more abundant opportunities. We study the interplay of power, satisfaction and frustration in distribution, concentration, and…
Fairness has emerged as an important consideration in algorithmic decision-making. Unfairness occurs when an agent with higher merit obtains a worse outcome than an agent with lower merit. Our central point is that a primary cause of…
We use sequential large-scale crawl data to empirically investigate and validate the dynamics that underlie the evolution of the structure of the web. We find that the overall structure of the web is defined by an intricate interplay…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the widely held belief that creativity is an important component of effective leadership. Creative leadership was found to increase the mean fitness…
Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional share of highly cited papers. Researchers reasoned that this could not have happened if success in science was random and introduced a hidden parameter Q, or talent, to…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
We study a version of the minority game in which one agent is allowed to join the game in a random fashion. It is shown that in the crowded regime, i.e., for small values of the memory size $m$ of the agents in the population, the agent…
A computational model for the distribution of wealth among the members of an ideal society is presented. It is determined that a realistic distribution of wealth depends upon two mechanisms: an asymmetric flux of wealth in trading…
We introduce and study a model of an interacting population of agents who collaborate in groups which compete for limited resources. Groups are formed by random matching agents and their worth is determined by the sum of the efforts…
Quota-based fairness mechanisms like the so-called Rooney rule or four-fifths rule are used in selection problems such as hiring or college admission to reduce inequalities based on sensitive demographic attributes. These mechanisms are…
Why do some things succeed in the marketplace of ideas? While some argue that content drives success, others suggest that style, or the way ideas are presented, also plays an important role. To provide a stringent test of style's…
This article investigates the influence of luck and strategic considerations on performance of teams participating in the M6 investment challenge. We find that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the extreme Sharpe ratios…
Inequality in human success may emerge through endogenous success-breeds-success dynamics but may also originate in pre-existing differences in talent. It is widely recognized that the skew in static frequency distributions of success…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
In frequently repeated matching scenarios, individuals may require diversification in their choices. Therefore, when faced with a set of potential outcomes, each individual may have an ideal lottery over outcomes that represents their…
The dynamics of dispersal-structured populations, consisting of competing individuals that are characterized by different diffusion coefficients but are otherwise identical, is investigated. Competition is taken into account through…