Contests and tournaments are widely used to spur innovation and motivate behavior. At the same time contests have been shown to be prone to strategic behaviors like e.g. sabotage. We investigate tw...
We study how contributors to innovation contests improve their performance through direct experience and by observing others as they synthesize learnable signals from different sources. Our researc...
In areas of human activity where performance is difficult to quantify in an objective fashion, reputation and networks of influence play a key role in determining access to resources and rewards. To understand the role of these factors, we reconstructed the exhibition history of half a million artists, mapping out the coexhibition network that captures the movement of art between institutions. Centrality within this network captured institutional prestige, allowing us to explore the career traje...
Last.Richard J. Radke(RPI: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)H-Index: 27
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Group meetings can suffer from serious problems that undermine performance, including bias, "groupthink", fear of speaking, and unfocused discussion. To better understand these issues, propose interventions, and thus improve team performance, we need to study human dynamics in group meetings. However, this process currently heavily depends on manual coding and video cameras. Manual coding is tedious, inaccurate, and subjective, while active video cameras can affect the natural behavior of meetin...
Decision-makers face a recurring choice: Repeat a past action in expectation of a familiar outcome (exploitation), or choose a novel action whose outcome is uncertain (exploration). Such decisions are fundamental in humans and animals. They are central to organizations, strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, where they have been studied extensively, mostly through simulations of agent-based models or analysis of archival and survey data. Here we add evidence from protocol analysis and behav...
Novelty is a key ingredient of innovation but quantifying it is difficult. This is especially true for visual work like graphic design. Using designs shared on an online social network of professional digital designers, we measure visual novelty using statistical learning methods to compare an image's features with those of images that have been created before. We then relate social network position to the novelty of the designer's images. We find that on this professional platform, users with d...
An important way to resolve games of conflict (snowdrift, hawk–dove, chicken) involves adopting a convention: a correlated equilibrium that avoids any conflict between aggressive strategies. Dynamic networks allow individuals to resolve conflict via their network connections rather than changing their strategy. Exploring how behavioural strategies coevolve with social networks reveals new dynamics that can help explain the origins and robustness of conventions. Here, we model the emergence of co...