Related papers: When abstinence increases prevalence
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
The statistics of outbreaks in a model for the propagation of meningococcal diseases is analyzed, taking into account the possibility that the population is fragmented into weakly connected patches. It is shown that, depending on the size…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
Vector-borne diseases often infect multiple host species, increasing the likelihood of disease persistence due to the presence of multiple reservoirs. Vector biting patterns and feeding preferences can shift in response to selective…
Bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment is a huge concern: introduction of any new antibiotic is shortly followed by the emergence of resistant bacterial isolates in the clinic. This issue is compounded by a severe lack of new…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
Epidemic outbreaks of new pathogens, or known pathogens in new populations, cause a great deal of fear because they are hard to predict. For theoretical models of disease spreading, on the other hand, quantities characterizing the outbreak…
This paper considers a simple model where a social planner can influence the spread-intensity of an infection wave, and, consequently, also the economic activity and population health, through a single parameter. Population health is…
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…
Users' interactions with recommender systems often involve more than simple acceptance or rejection. We highlight two overlooked states: hesitation, when people deliberate without certainty, and tolerance, when this hesitation escalates…
Social and economic networks are often multiplexed, meaning that people are connected by different types of relationships -- such as borrowing goods and giving advice. We make two contributions to the study of multiplexing and the…
We introduce a way to compare actions in decision problems. One action is safer than another if the set of beliefs at which the decision-maker prefers the safer action expands as the decision-maker becomes more risk averse. We provide a…
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
This paper studies a decentralized many-to-one matching market where preferences remain uncertain during the matching process. Institutions initiate matching by sending offers, and applicants decide whether to accept upon receiving them.…
Inspired by Minority Games, we constructed a novel individual-level game of adaptive decision-making based on the dilemma of deciding whether to participate in voluntary influenza vaccination programs. The proportion of the population…
Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…
In the Stable Marriage Problem two sets of agents must be paired according to mutual preferences, which may happen to conflict. We present two generalizations of its sex-oriented version, aiming to take into account correlations between the…
Here we study the effects of adopting different strategies against different opponent instead of adopting the same strategy against all of them in the prisoner dilemma structured in well-mixed populations. We consider an evolutionary…