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Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…
The distribution of gross earnings of movies released each year show a distribution having a power-law tail with Pareto exponent $\alpha \simeq 2$. While this offers interesting parallels with income distributions of individuals, it is also…
We study expert advice under reputational incentives, with sell-side equity research as the lead application. A long-lived analyst receives a continuous private signal about a binary payoff and recommends a risky (Buy) or safe action.…
Individuals in free societies frequently exhibit striking coordination when making independent decisions en masse. Examples include the regular appearance of hit products or memes with substantially higher popularity compared to their…
Deploying an algorithmically informed policy is a significant intervention in the structure of society. As is increasingly acknowledged, predictive algorithms have performative effects: using them can shift the distribution of social…
Online platforms are an increasingly popular tool for people to produce, promote or sell their work. However recent studies indicate that social disparities and biases present in the real world might transfer to online platforms and could…
A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience.…
Music is a universal feature of human culture, linked to embodied cognitive functions that drive learning, action, and the emergence of creativity and individuality. Evidence highlights the critical role of statistical learning an implicit…
The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…
Despite popular media interest in uncovering the creative habits of successful people, there is a surprising paucity of empirical research on the diversity of tendencies and preferences people have when engaged in creative work. We…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
In many societal resource allocation domains, machine learning methods are increasingly used to either score or rank agents in order to decide which ones should receive either resources (e.g., homeless services) or scrutiny (e.g., child…
Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about whether an early-career setback may augment or hamper an individual's future career impact. Here we examine junior scientists applying for U.S. National…
In this paper we propose a mechanistic model that links micro social interactions to macro observables in the case of diffusion of film-going decisions. We devise a generalized epidemic model to capture the temporal evolution of box office…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. The…
The study of complex systems has attracted widespread attention from researchers in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Prediction is one of the central issues in this field. Although most related studies have…
Algorithmic systems have been used to inform consequential decisions for at least a century. Recidivism prediction dates back to the 1920s. Automated credit scoring dates began in the middle of the last century, but the last decade has…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
Many workers at the production department of Libyan Textile Company work with different performances. Plan of company management is paying the money according to the specific performance and quality requirements for each worker. Thus, it is…
Power-seeking behavior is a key source of risk from advanced AI, but our theoretical understanding of this phenomenon is relatively limited. Building on existing theoretical results demonstrating power-seeking incentives for most reward…