From the early literature on the role of firm managers (Alchian and Demsetz 1972) to the industrial organisation on contracts and mechanism design (Laffont and Martimort 2009), economists have given a lot of attention to find solutions to the imperfect alignment between individuals’ incentives and an organisation’s collective goals (Prendergast 1999). In that literature a key role of managers i...

Models of collective animal behaviour, such as the ocking of birds, are usually based upon simulations that appear to exhibit properties of the animals in question. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach; that of automatically extracting a model of animal behaviour from video sequences of real animals. Point distribution models (PDMs) are used to describe the shape of a ock of ducks...

The work presented herein focuses on the design of distributed autonomous controllers for collective behaviour of Micro-unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Two alternative approaches to this topic are introduced: one based upon the Evolutionary Robotics (ER) paradigm, the other one upon flocking principles. Three computer simulators have been developed in order to carry out the required experiment...

Human activities increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviors to population-level outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a simple generative model for the collective behavior of millions of social networking site users who are deciding between different software applications. Our model incorporates two distinct mechanisms: one is...

Mathematical models of dispersal in biological systems are often written in terms of partial differential equations (PDEs) which describe the time evolution of population-level variables (concentrations, densities). A more detailed modelling approach is given by individual-based (agent-based) models which describe the behaviour of each organism. In recent years, an intermediate modelling method...

Electret Model, Biological System It is suggested that several basic properties of biological systems, such as muscular motions, active transport of energy, etc., may be described in terms of a dynamical model possessing metastable ferroelectric states. The model is based on the observation that configurationally unstable anions, in particular O 2 , can lead to ferroelectric phase transitions. ...