Related papers: Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success …
The recognition of the agency of the knower has enormously enriched our understanding of knowledge production. There is a growing realization that what we know about how we know affects our interpretation of reality. This realization…
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an…
The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
How do genes affect cognitive ability or other human quantitative traits such as height or disease risk? Progress on this challenging question is likely to be significant in the near future. I begin with a brief review of psychometric…
The prospects of Kahneman and Tversky, Mega Million and Powerball lotteries, St. Petersburg paradox, premature profits and growing losses criticized by Livermore are reviewed under an angle of view comparing mathematical expectations with…
Risk and uncertainty will always be a matter of experience, luck, skills, and modelling. Leverage is another concept, which is critical for the investor decisions and results. Adaptive skills and quantitative probabilistic methods need to…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
A typical power calculation is performed by replacing unknown population-level quantities in the power function with what is observed in external studies. Many authors and practitioners view this as an assumed value of power and offer the…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
We study empirically how fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement or merit, measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average fame grows…
Implicit bias is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities (or lack thereof) to a member from a particular social group (e.g., defined by gender or race). Studies on implicit bias have shown that these unconscious stereotypes can…
Using a model based on generalised Lotka Volterra dynamics together with some recent results for the solution of generalised Langevin equations, we show that the equilibrium solution for the probability distribution of wealth has two…
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
Venture capital outcomes are dominated by a small number of extreme successes, making it difficult to distinguish investor skill from favorable realizations in a highly skewed return distribution. We study this question by comparing…
When multiple innovations compete for adoption, historical chance leading to early advantage can generate lock-in effects that allow suboptimal innovations to succeed at the expense of superior alternatives. Research on the diffusion of…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…