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The competitive and cooperative forces of natural selection have driven the evolution of intelligence for millions of years, culminating in nature's vast biodiversity and the complexity of human minds. Inspired by this process, we propose a…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
A planner aims to target individuals who exceed a threshold in a characteristic, such as wealth or ability. The individuals can rank their friends according to the characteristic. We study a strategy-proof mechanism for the planner to use…
Dworczak et al. (2021) study when certain market structures are optimal in the presence of heterogeneous preferences. A key assumption is that the social planner knows the joint distribution of the value of the good and marginal value of…
The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have…
Recent studies in the science of success have shown that the highest-impact works of scientists or artists happen randomly and uniformly over the individual's career. Yet in certain artistic endeavours, such as acting in films and TV,…
We employ an agent-based model for cultural dynamics to investigate the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the collective behavior of a social system. We introduce heterogeneity as a random distribution of defects or imperfections in a…
The allocation of resources plays an important role in the completion of system objectives and tasks, especially in the presence of strategic adversaries. Optimal allocation strategies are becoming increasingly more complex, given that…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States" (arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians, the authors use data to…
Typically, merit is defined with respect to some intrinsic measure of worth. We instead consider a setting where an individual's worth is \emph{relative}: when a Decision Maker (DM) selects a set of individuals from a population to maximise…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of…
The Condorcet Jury Theorem or the Miracle of Aggregation are frequently invoked to ensure the competence of some aggregate decision-making processes. In this article we explore an estimation of the prior probability of the thesis predicted…
Cooperation between individuals is emergent in all parts of society, yet mechanistic reasons for this emergence is ill understood in the literature. A specific example of this is insurance. Recent work has, though, shown that assuming the…
The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…
We propose a simple yet effective solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
We study a variation of the minority game. There are N agents. Each has to choose between one of two alternatives everyday, and there is reward to each member of the smaller group. The agents cannot communicate with each other, but try to…