Related papers: Innovation and imitation
Accurately modeling the production of new ideas is crucial for innovation theory and endogenous growth models. This paper provides a comprehensive methodological survey of strategies for estimating idea production functions. We explore…
I develop a simple Schumpeterian agent-based model where the entry and exit of firms, their productivity and markup, the birth of new industries and the social structure of the population are endogenous and use it to study the causes of…
We develop a thermodynamic framework for modeling innovation adoption and abandonment dynamics using statistical mechanics. Starting from a mathematical model for an adoption distribution that fits empirically obtained date, we construct a…
Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions--the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations--can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs…
We provide a theoretical framework to understand when firms may benefit from exploiting previously abandoned technologies and brands. We model for the long run process of innovation, allowing for sustainable diversity and comebacks of old…
The well-known Ising model used in statistical physics was adapted to a social dynamics context to simulate the adoption of a technological innovation. The model explicitly combines (a) an individual's perception of the advantages of an…
We discuss the distribution of commuting distances and its relation to income. Using data from Denmark, the UK, and the US, we show that the commuting distance is (i) broadly distributed with a slow decaying tail that can be fitted by a…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
Behavior cloning of expert demonstrations can speed up learning optimal policies in a more sample-efficient way over reinforcement learning. However, the policy cannot extrapolate well to unseen states outside of the demonstration data,…
Diffusion models have demonstrated significant promise in various generative tasks; however, they often struggle to satisfy challenging constraints. Our approach addresses this limitation by rethinking training-free loss-guided diffusion…
This paper studies the subspace clustering problem in which data points collected from high-dimensional ambient space lie in a union of linear subspaces. Subspace clustering becomes challenging when the dimension of intersection between…
Dynamic diversification---finding a set of data points with maximum diversity from a time-dependent sample pool---is an important task in recommender systems, web search, database search, and notification services, to avoid showing users…
We introduce a mathematical model that combines the concepts of complex contagion with payoff-biased imitation, to describe how social behaviors spread through a population. Traditional models of social learning by imitation are based on…
Technology convergence integrates distinct domains to create novel combinations, driving radical innovation that reshapes markets and industries. However, most approaches rely on pairwise networks that cannot capture multi-technology…
We introduce economic models based on Boolean Delay Equations: this formalism makes easier to take into account the complexity of the interactions between firms and is particularly appropriate for studying the propagation of an initial…
There is a broad recognition that commitment-based mechanisms can promote coordination and cooperative behaviours in both biological populations and self-organised multi-agent systems by making individuals' intentions explicit prior to…
Over the years, the growing availability of extensive datasets about registered patents allowed researchers to better understand technological innovation drivers. In this work, we investigate how the technological contents of patents…
A central question in economics is whether automation will displace human labor and diminish standards of living. Whilst prior works typically frame this question as a competition between human labor and machines, we frame it as a…
The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in…