Related papers: Don't follow the leader: How ranking performance r…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…
Consider a collection of m competing machine learning algorithms. Given their performance on a benchmark of datasets, we would like to identify the best performing algorithm. Specifically, which algorithm is most likely to ``win'' (rank…
Appropriate ranking algorithms and incentive mechanisms are essential to the creation of high-quality information by users of a social network. However, evaluating such mechanisms in a quantifiable way is a difficult problem. Studies of…
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the…
Imitation learning is an approach in which an agent learns how to execute a task by trying to mimic how one or more teachers perform it. This learning approach offers a compromise between the time it takes to learn a new task and the effort…
We study the roles of social and individual learning on outcomes of the Minority Game model of a financial market. Social learning occurs via agents adopting the strategies of their neighbours within a social network, while individual…
Members of social networks are given opportunities to bestow positive recognition upon one another by means of constructs such as "likes" and "retweets." Although recipients no doubt experience utility from these actions, one might question…
Recommender systems help people cope with the problem of information overload. A recently proposed adaptive news recommender model [Medo et al., 2009] is based on epidemic-like spreading of news in a social network. By means of agent-based…
Content creators compete for exposure on recommendation platforms, and such strategic behavior leads to a dynamic shift over the content distribution. However, how the creators' competition impacts user welfare and how the relevance-driven…
Indirect reciprocity unveils how social cooperation is founded upon moral systems. Within the frame of dyadic games based on individual reputations, the "leading-eight" strategies distinguish themselves in promoting and sustaining…
The theoretical study of social learning typically assumes that each agent's action affects only her own payoff. In this paper, I present a model in which agents' actions directly affect the payoffs of other agents. On a discrete time line,…
Reflexive metrics is a branch of science studies which explores how the demand for accountability and performance measurement in science has shaped the research culture in recent decades. Hypercompetition and publication pressure are part…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
We propose a simple model that describes the dynamics of efficiencies of competing agents. Agents communicate leading to increase of efficiencies of underachievers, and an efficiency of each agent can increase or decrease irrespectively of…
It is not easy to rationalize how peer review, as the current grassroots of science, can work based on voluntary contributions of reviewers. There is no rationale to write impartial and thorough evaluations. Consequently, there is no risk…
We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…
Hierarchy of social organization is a ubiquitous property of animal and human groups, linked to resource allocation, collective decisions, individual health, and even to social instability. Experimental evidence shows that both intrinsic…
The hiring problem is studied for general strategies based only on the relative ranking of the candidates; this includes some well known strategies studied before such as hiring above the median. We give general limit theorems for the…