Related papers: Social learning moderates the tradeoffs between ef…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
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…
Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
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…
Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
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…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
Foraging and acquiring of food is a delicate balance between managing the costs, both energy and social, and individual preferences. Previous research on the solitary foraging of free ranging dogs showed that they prioritized the…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Social learning is defined as the ability of a population to aggregate information, a process which must crucially depend on the mechanisms of social interaction. Consumers choosing which product to buy, or voters deciding which option to…
We consider a large class of social learning models in which a group of agents face uncertainty regarding a state of the world, share the same utility function, observe private signals, and interact in a general dynamic setting. We…
Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…
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…
Efficient allocation and use of limited resources are fundamental to advancing collective welfare and achieving long-term societal sustainability. This challenge involves not only how policymakers distribute scarce resources among…