We present findings from a field experiment on team diversity. Individuals working as canvassers in an elections-related experiment were randomly assigned a junior teammate, a senior manager and a set of households to visit. This created random variation in the degree of horizontal diversity, vertical (or hierarchical) diversity and external (or client) diversity within each team. We find that ...

Following the approach introduced by Cavers and Ho, the performance of component-interleaved multidimensional constellations over the Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated analytically. Error probabilities are approximated by the union bound using an exact expression of the pairwise error probability. Simulation results show that this bound can be used effectively as a design criterion for the s...

As few real systems comprise indistinguishable units, diversity is a hallmark of nature. Diversity among interacting units shapes properties of collective behavior such as synchronization and information transmission. However, the benefits of diversity on information processing at the edge of a phase transition, ordinarily assumed to emerge from identical elements, remain largely unexplored. An...

Diverse directors may have diverse preferences over firms’ policies or even objectives. As shown by Arrow (1951), diverse individual preferences may fail to univocally aggregate in collective preferences and may consequently lead to arbitrary and volatile decisions. Using the board of directors as a laboratory, we test whether diversity leads to higher performance volatility. We show that firms...

Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms to enable global exploration and to avoid poor performance due to premature convergence. This book chapter reviews runtime analyses that have shown benefits of population diversity, either through explicit diversity mechanisms or through naturally emerging diversity. These works show that the benefits of diversity are manifold: diversit...

In a multi-user environment, coded cooperation creates transmit diversity for small mobiles (e.g. handsets) that cannot support more than one antenna. Coded cooperation allows these mobiles to share their antennas via a simple and effective coding method. In this work we present an analytical methodology for evaluating the performance of coded cooperation. We develop tight bounds for bit and bl...

It is widely accepted that there is a strong correlation between diversity in the initial population and Genetic Algorithms’ performance. One contribution of this paper is to show that there is not such a strong correlation between diversity and Genetic Algorithms’ performance, at least with the standard range of diversity measures used in a randomly generated population and with the misuse det...

The diversity performance of the modurated scattering array antenna (MSAA) with various array spacing is measured in Rayleigh fading environment to investigate experimentally the relation between the array spacing and the diversity performance of the MSAA. A 2-element modulated scattering monopole array antenna with various array spacing which is supposed to be used for mobile handset applicati...

Biological functions are typically performed by groups of cells that express predominantly the same genes, yet display a continuum of phenotypes. While it is known how one genotype can generate such non-genetic diversity, it remains unclear how different phenotypes contribute to the performance of biological function at the population level. We developed a microfluidic device to simultaneously ...

It is widely believed that greater initial population diversity leads to improved performance in genetic algorithms. However, this assumption has not been rigorously tested previously. We put this assumption to the test on two benchmark problems and found that greater diversity did not lead to improved performance. This result will require a serious rethinking on the part of the evolutionary co...