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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…

We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…

Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…

We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…

Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…

Collective intelligence is the ability of a group to perform more effectively than any individual alone. Diversity among group members is a key condition for the emergence of collective intelligence, but maintaining diversity is challenging…

The minority model was introduced to study the competition between agents with limited information. It has the remarkable feature that, as the amount of information available increases, the collective gain made by the agents is reduced.…

The mutual relationship between evolution and learning is a controversial argument among the artificial intelligence and neuro-evolution communities. After more than three decades, there is still no common agreement on the matter. In this…

We consider social learning in a changing world. Society can remain responsive to state changes only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which limits the value of social learning. When the state is close to persistent, a…

Observational learning often involves congestion: an agent gets lower payoff from an action when more predecessors have taken that action. This preference to act differently from previous agents may paradoxically increase all but one…

An evolving population, in which individual members (`agents') adapt their behaviour according to past experience, is of central importance to many disciplines. Because of their limited knowledge and capabilities, agents are forced to make…

Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…

Social learning, copying other's behavior without actual experience, offers a cost-effective means of knowledge acquisition. However, it raises the fundamental question of which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals…

Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…

We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…

A defining feature of human culture is that knowledge and technology continually improve over time. Such cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) probably depends far more heavily on how reliably information is preserved than on how efficiently…

We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…

Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance…

A selfish learner seeks to maximize their own success, disregarding others. When success is measured as payoff in a game played against another learner, mutual selfishness typically fails to produce the optimal outcome for a pair of…

When an individual's behavior has rational characteristics, this may lead to irrational collective actions for the group. A wide range of organisms from animals to humans often evolve the social attribute of cooperation to meet this…