Related papers: Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success …

Different models to study the wealth distribution in an artificial society have considered a transactional dynamics as the driving force. Those models include a risk aversion factor, but also a finite probability of favoring the poorer…

The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…

The efficient use of available resources is a key factor in achieving success on both personal and organizational levels. One of the crucial resources in knowledge economy is time. The ability to force others to adapt to our schedule even…

In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…

Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…

We study an agent-based model of evolution of wealth distribution in a macro-economic system. The evolution is driven by multiplicative stochastic fluctuations governed by the law of proportionate growth and interactions between agents. We…

In many prediction problems, the predictive model affects the distribution of the prediction target. This phenomenon is known as performativity and is often caused by the behavior of individuals with vested interests in the outcome of the…

In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…

Algorithmic Information Theory has inspired intractable constructions of general intelligence (AGI), and undiscovered tractable approximations are likely feasible. Reinforcement Learning (RL), the dominant paradigm by which an agent might…

I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…

One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…

In this paper, we tackle the problem of innovation spreading from a modeling point of view. We consider a networked system of individuals, with a competition between two groups. We show its relation to the innovation spreading issues. We…

The puzzling idea that the combination of independent estimates of the magnitude of a quantity results in a very accurate prediction, which is superior to any or, at least, to most of the individual estimates is known as the wisdom of…

Different agents need to make a prediction. They observe identical data, but have different models: they predict using different explanatory variables. We study which agent believes they have the best predictive ability -- as measured by…

Bias exists in how we pick leaders, who we perceive as being influential, and who we interact with, not only in society, but in organizational contexts. Drawing from leadership emergence and social influence theories, we investigate…

This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…

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…

Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…

Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…

Proportionality is an attractive fairness concept that has been applied to a range of problems including the facility location problem, a classic problem in social choice. In our work, we propose a concept called Strong Proportionality,…