Related papers: The gold-rush effect: how innovation speeds up
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
How does the number of collaborators affect individual productivity? Results of prior research have been conflicting, with some studies reporting an increase in individual productivity as the number of collaborators grows, while other…
Is a causal description of human wealth history conceivable? To investigate the matter we introduce a simple causal albeit strongly aggregated model, assuming that the observed wealth growth is mainly driven by human collaborative efforts…
Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some…
In this work we introduce a variant of the Yule-Simon model for preferential growth by incorporating a finite kernel to model the effects of bounded memory. We characterize the properties of the model combining analytical arguments with…
Galor discovered many mysteries of the growth process. He lists them in his Unified Growth Theory and wonders how they can be explained. Close inspection of his mysteries reveals that they are of his own creation. They do not exist. He…
This paper proposes a non-phenomenological model of population growth that is based on the interactions between the individuals that compose the system. It is assumed that the individuals interact cooperatively and competitively. As a…
This contribution provides microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck, explains the high variance of individual travel time by the statistical analysis of trajectories. The analysis shows that this…
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth…
We study several models of growth driven by innovation and imitation by a continuum of firms, focusing on the interaction between the two. We first investigate a model on a technology ladder where innovation and imitation combine to…
The recently introduced Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP) is a model of combinatorial innovation aiming to explain the "hockey-stick" upward trend of human technological evolution, where an explosion in the number of produced items with…
Using time series of US patents per million inhabitants, knowledge-generating cycles can be distinguished. These cycles partly coincide with Kondratieff long waves. The changes in the slopes between them indicate discontinuities in the…
Optimization and expansion are two modes of staged evolution of complex systems where macroscopic observables change at a decreasing, respectively increasing, rate. A prime example of evolutionary expansion, Gross Domestic Product (GDP)…
P.W. Anderson proposed the concept of complexity in order to describe the emergence and growth of macroscopic collective patterns out of the simple interactions of many microscopic agents. In the physical sciences this paradigm was…
We use a simple combinatorial model of technological change to explain the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a sudden large improvement in technology, which resulted in significant increases in human wealth and life…
This paper presents a dynamic model to study the impact on the economic outcomes in different societies during the Malthusian Era of individualism (time spent working alone) and collectivism (complementary time spent working with others).…
We propose a microscopic model to describe how individual opinions shared between interacting agents initiate excessive collective expectations about a new idea or an innovation, followed by a swift collapse towards a dramatic collective…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
Systems driven by innovation, a pivotal force in human society, present various intriguing statistical regularities, from the Heaps' law to logarithmic scaling or somewhat different patterns for the innovation rates. The Urn Model with…
We develop two statistical models for space-time abundance data based on a stochastic underlying continuous individual movement. In contrast to current models for abundance in statistical ecology, our models exploit the explicit connection…