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 research draws on a 10-year panel of more than 55,000 individuals participating in a firm-hosted online innovation community sponsoring creative t-shirt design contests. Our data set contains almost 180,000 submissions that reflect signals of direct performance evaluation from both the community and the firm. Our data set also contains almost 150 million ratings that reflect signals for learning from observing the completed work of others. We have three key findings. First, we find a period of initial investment with decreased performance. This is because individuals struggle to synthesize learnable signals from early performance evaluation. This finding is contrary to other studies that report faster learning from early direct experience when improvements are easiest to achieve. Second, we find that individuals consistently improve their performance from observing others’ good examples. However, whether they improve from observing others’ bad examples depends on their ability to correctly recognize that work as being of low quality. Third, we find that individuals can successfully integrate signals about what is valued by the firm hosting the community, not just about what is valued by the community. We thus provide important insights into the mechanisms of how individuals learn in crowdsourced innovation and provide important qualifications for the often-heralded theme of “learning from failures.”

Source: pubsonline.informs.org

This paper studies the resilience of public policies that governments design for catalyzing economic development. This property depends on the extent to which behavioral heuristics and spillover effects allow policymakers to attain their original goals when a particular policy cannot be funded as originally planned. This scenario takes place, for example, when unanticipated events such as natural disasters or political turmoil obstruct the use of resources to advance certain policy issues, e.g., infrastructure or labor reforms. Here, we analyze how the adaptive capacity of the policy-making process generates resilience in the face of disruptions. In order to estimate the allocation of resources across policies, we employ a computational model that accounts for diverse social mechanisms, for example, coevolutionary learning and network interdependencies. In our simulations, we use a data set of 117 countries on 79 development indicators over an 11-year period. Then, we calculate a resilience score corresponding to each development indicator via counter-factual analysis of policy disruptions. Next, we assess whether some development strategies produce resilient/fragile policy profiles. Finally, by studying the relationship between policy resilience and policy priority, we determine which issues are bottlenecks to economic development.

 

The Resilience of Public Policies in Economic Development
Gonzalo Castañeda and Omar A. Guerrero

Complexity
Volume 2018, Article ID 9672849, 15 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9672849

Source: www.hindawi.com

Tasks encountered in daily living may have instabilities and more dimensions than are sampled by the senses such as when carrying a cup of coffee and only the surface motion and overall momentum are sensed, not the fluid dynamics. Anticipating non-periodic dynamics is difficult but not impossible because mutual coordination allows for chaotic processes to synchronize to each other and become periodic. A chaotic oscillator with random period and amplitude affords being stabilized onto a periodic trajectory by a weak input if the driver incorporates information about the oscillator. We studied synchronization with predictable and unpredictable stimuli where the unpredictable stimuli could be non-interactive or interactive. The latter condition required learning to control a chaotic system. We expected better overall performance with the predictable but more learning and generalization with unpredictable interactive stimuli. Participants practiced an auditory-motor synchronization task by matching their sonified hand movements to sonified tutors: the Non-Interactive Predictable tutor (NI-P) was a sinusoid, the Non-Interactive Unpredictable (NI-U) was a chaotic system, the Interactive Unpredictable (I-U) was the same chaotic system with an added weak input from the participant’s movement. Different pre/post-practice stimuli evaluated generalization. Quick improvement was seen in NI-P. Synchronization, dynamic similarity, and causal interaction increased with practice in I-U but not in NI-U. Generalization was seen for few pre-post stimuli in NI-P, none in NI-U, and most stimuli in I-U. Synchronization with novel chaotic dynamics is challenging but mutual interaction enables the behavioral control of such dynamics and the practice of complex motor skills.

 

Entraining chaotic dynamics: A novel movement sonification paradigm could promote generalization
Dobromir Dotov, Tom Froese

Human Movement Science
Volume 61, October 2018, Pages 27-41

Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Percolation on complex networks is used both as a model for dynamics on networks, such as network robustness or epidemic spreading, and as a benchmark for our models of networks, where our ability to predict percolation measures our ability to describe the networks themselves. In many applications, correctly identifying the phase transition of percolation on real-world networks is of critical importance. Unfortunately, this phase transition is obfuscated by the finite size of real systems, making it hard to distinguish finite size effects from the inaccuracy of a given approach that fails to capture important structural features. Here, we borrow the perspective of smeared phase transitions and argue that many observed discrepancies are due to the complex structure of real networks rather than to finite size effects only. In fact, several real networks often used as benchmarks feature a smeared phase transition where inhomogeneities in the topological distribution of the order parameter do not vanish in the thermodynamic limit. We find that these smeared transitions are sometimes better described as sequential phase transitions within correlated subsystems. Our results shed light not only on the nature of the percolation transition in complex systems, but also provide two important insights on the numerical and analytical tools we use to study them. First, we propose a measure of local susceptibility to better detect both clean and smeared phase transitions by looking at the topological variability of the order parameter. Second, we highlight a shortcoming in state-of-the-art analytical approaches such as message passing, which can detect smeared transitions but not characterize their nature.

 

Smeared phase transitions in percolation on real complex networks
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Antoine Allard

Source: arxiv.org

A well-known hypothesis, with far-reaching implications, is that biological evolution should preferentially lead to states that are dynamically critical. In previous papers, we showed that a well-known model of genetic regulatory networks, namely, that of random Boolean networks, allows one to study in depth the relationship between the dynamical regime of a living being’s gene network and its response to permanent perturbations. In this paper, we analyze a huge set of new experimental data on single gene knockouts in S. cerevisiae, laying down a statistical framework to determine its dynamical regime. We find that the S. cerevisiae network appears to be slightly ordered, but close to the critical region. Since our analysis relies on dichotomizing continuous data, we carefully consider the issue of an optimal threshold choice.

 

Dynamical Criticality in Gene Regulatory Networks
Marco Villani, Luca La Rocca, Stuart Alan Kauffman, and Roberto Serra

Complexity
Volume 2018, Article ID 5980636, 14 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/5980636

Source: www.hindawi.com