Noyce Conference Room
Seminar
  US Mountain Time
Speaker: 
Max Jerdee

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

Abstract: Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one to quantify the strength of competitors or predict the outcome of future contests. Here we generalize this approach to incorporate two additional features: an element of randomness or luck that leads to upset wins, and a "depth of competition'' variable that measures the complexity of a game or equivalently the steepness or inequality in a social hierarchy. Fitting the resulting model to a large collection of data sets we estimate depth and luck in a range of games, sports, and social situations. In general, we find that social competition tends to be "deep,'' meaning it has a pronounced hierarchy with many distinct levels, but also that there is often a nonzero chance of an upset victory, meaning that dominance challenges can be won even by significant underdogs. Competition in sports and games, by contrast, tends to be shallow and in most cases there is little evidence of upset wins, beyond those already implied by the shallowness of the hierarchy.

Speaker

Max JerdeeMax JerdeePhysics PhD student at the University of Michigan
SFI Host: 
Cris Moore

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