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While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
In capitalist societies, only a single right can be fully exerted without constraints of any kind: the limitless accumulation of wealth. Such imperative or prime axiom is the ultimate cause of the raising waves of inequalities observed…
A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we…
Algorithms are increasingly used to aid, or in some cases supplant, human decision-making, particularly for decisions that hinge on predictions. As a result, two additional features in addition to prediction quality have generated interest:…
We consider a model of power distribution in a social system where a set of agents play a simple game on a graph: the probability of winning each round is proportional to the agent's current power, and the winner gets more power as a…
Though the ability of human beings to deal with probabilities has been put into question, the assessment of rarity is a crucial competence underlying much of human decision-making and is pervasive in spontaneous narrative behaviour. This…
Despite the tremendous advancements in the field of network theory, very few studies have taken weights in the interactions into consideration that emerge naturally in all real world systems. Using random matrix analysis of a weighted…
We initiate a novel direction in randomized social choice by proposing a new definition of agent utility for randomized outcomes. Each agent has a preference over all outcomes and a {\em quantile} parameter. Given a {\em lottery} over the…
This study explores the concept of prominence as a candidate trait, understood as the perceived worthiness of attention candidates elicit from regular citizens in the context of low information elections. It proposes two dimensions of…
In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather…
Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some…
We study the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents where each is to receive at most one. To ensure fairness in the absence of monetary compensation, we consider random assignments. Random Priority, also known as Random Serial…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This balance theory suggests that people…
We use Monte Carlo techniques to simulate an organized prediction competition between a group of a scientific experts acting under the influence of a ``self-governing'' prediction reward algorithm. Our aim is to illustrate the advantages of…
The law of proportionate growth simply states that the time dependent change of a quantity $x$ is proportional to $x$. Its applicability to a wide range of dynamic phenomena is based on various assumptions for the proportionality factor,…
The world of empirical machine learning (ML) strongly relies on benchmarks in order to determine the relative effectiveness of different algorithms and methods. This paper proposes the notion of "a benchmark lottery" that describes the…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
The Matthew effect describes the phenomenon where the rich tend to get richer. Such a success-driven mechanism has been studied in spatial public goods games in an inter-group way, where each individual's social power is enhanced across all…
An increasingly large number of experiments study the labor productivity effects of automation technologies such as generative algorithms. A popular question in these experiments relates to inequality: does the technology increase output…