In social hierarchies, dominant individuals experience reproductive and health benefits, but the costs of social dominance remain a topic of debate. Prevailing hypotheses predict that higher-ranking males experience higher testosterone and glucocorticoid (stress hormone) levels than lower-ranking males when hierarchies are unstable but not otherwise. In this long-term study of rank-related stre...

Markets, hierarchies, and networks are widely understood to be the three primary forms of social organization. In this article, we study the choice between these forms in a general, agent-based model (ABM) of cooperation. The organizational ecology is the product, an emergent property, of the set of choices made by agents contingent on their individual attributes and beliefs about the populatio...

Identifying hierarchies and rankings of nodes in directed graphs is fundamental in many applications such as social network analysis, biology, economics, and finance. A recently proposed method identifies the hierarchy by finding the ordered partition of nodes which minimises a score function, termed agony. This function penalises the links violating the hierarchy in a way depending on the stre...

Williamson’s (1971) model of control loss in organizational hierarchies describes the cumulative decay of influence of superiors over subordinates who are separated by a number of hierarchical levels in the chain-of-command. This paper shows that control loss may be deduced from a network theory of social influence, and it shows that ties among actors at the same hierarchical level—Fayol’s gang...

Body size and other signs of physical prowess are associated with leadership hierarchies in many social species. Here we (1) assess whether facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity have different effects on leadership judgments in simulated wartime and peacetime contexts and (2) test how facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity influence dominance percept...

In animal societies, some stressful events can lead to higher levels of physiological stress. Such stressors, like social rank, also predict an increased vulnerability to an array of diseases. However, the physiological relationship between social rank and stress varies between different species, as well as within groups of a single species. For example, dominant individuals are more socially s...

We consider the problem of computing shortest paths subject to an additional resource constraint such as a hard limit on the (positive) height difference of the path. This is typically of interest in the context of bicycle route planning, or when energy consumption is to be limited. So far, the exact computation of such constrained shortest paths was not feasible on large networks; we show that...

When you drive to somewhere ‘far away’, you will leave your current location via one of only a few ‘important’ traffic junctions. Recently, other research groups and we have largely independently developed this informal observation into transit node routing, a technique for reducing quickest-path queries in road networks to a small number of table lookups. The contribution of our paper is twofo...