Related papers: Optimal majority threshold in a stochastic environ…
The voter model and the Axelrod model are two of the main stochastic processes that describe the spread of opinions on networks. The former includes social influence, the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact,…
Altruistic behaviour is disadvantageous for the individual while is advantageous for its group. If the target of the selection is the individual, one would expect the selection process to lead to populations formed by wholly homogeneous…
We consider stochastic growth models to represent population subject to catastrophes. We analyze the subject from different set ups considering or not spatial restrictions, whether dispersion is a good strategy to increase the population…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
In this paper, we discuss optimality conditions for optimization problems involving random state constraints, which are modeled in probabilistic or almost sure form. While the latter can be understood as the limiting case of the former, the…
Policy-makers are often faced with the task of distributing a limited supply of resources. To support decision-making in these settings, statisticians are confronted with two challenges: estimands are defined by allocation strategies that…
We study a control problem where the state equation is a nonlinear partial differential equation of the calculus of variation in a bounded domain, perturbed by noise. We allow the control to act on the boundary and set stochastic boundary…
Stochastic dominance is an important concept in probability theory, econometrics and social choice theory for robustly modeling agents' preferences between random outcomes. While many works have been dedicated to the univariate case, little…
We study the design of optimal allocation mechanisms in an environment where agents and goods arrive stochastically. Agents have private types that determine the principal payoff. Either agents or goods can be held in a queue at a flow cost…
Altruistic lobbying is lobbying in the public interest or in the interest of the least protected part of the society. In fact, an altruist has a wide range of strategies, from behaving in the interest of the society as a whole to the…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
The Verhulst model is probably the best known macroscopic rate equation in population ecology. It depends on two parameters, the intrinsic growth rate and the carrying capacity. These parameters can be estimated for different populations…
Validating and controlling safety-critical systems in uncertain environments necessitates probabilistic reachable sets of future state evolutions. The existing methods of computing probabilistic reachable sets normally assume that…
Maximum-entropy ensembles are key primitives in statistical mechanics from which thermodynamic properties can be derived. Over the decades, several approaches have been put forward in order to justify from minimal assumptions the use of…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
How diffusion impacts on ecological dynamics under the Allee effect and spatial constraints? That is the question we address. Employing a microscopic minimal model in a metapopulation (without imposing nonlinear birth and death rates) we…
The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
We propose and study a maximum likelihood estimator of stochastic frontier models with endogeneity in cross-section data when the composite error term may be correlated with inputs and environmental variables. Our framework is a…
For regression model selection via maximum likelihood estimation, we adopt a vector representation of candidate models and study the likelihood ratio confidence region for the regression parameter vector of a full model. We show that when…