O Oleh Krehel

Cognitive distance, absorptive capacity and group rationality: a simulation study.

We report the results of a simulation study in which we explore the joint effect of group absorptive capacity (as the average individual rationality of the group members) and cognitive distance (as the distance between the most rational group member and the rest of the group) on the emergence of collective rationality in groups. We start from empirical results reported in the literature on group rationality as collective group level competence and use data on real-life groups of four and five to validate a mathematical model. We then use this mathematical model to predict group level scores from a variety of possible group configurations (varying both in cognitive distance and average individual rationality). Our results show that both group competence and cognitive distance are necessary conditions for emergent group rationality. Group configurations, in which the groups become more rational than the most rational group member, are groups scoring low on cognitive distance and scoring high on absorptive capacity.

Residence time estimates for asymmetric simple exclusion dynamics on strips

The target of our study is to approximate numerically and, in some particular physically relevant cases, also analytically, the residence time of particles undergoing an asymmetric simple exclusion dynamics on a two-dimensional vertical strip. The sources of asymmetry are twofold: (i) the choice of boundary conditions (different reservoir levels) and (ii) the strong anisotropy from a drift nonlinear in density with prescribed directionality. We focus on the effect of the choice of anisotropy on residence time. We analyze our results by means of two theoretical models, a Mean Field and a one-dimensional Birth and Death one. For positive drift we find a striking agreement between Monte Carlo and theoretical results. In the zero drift case we still find agreement as long as particles can freely escape the strip through the bottom boundary. Otherwise, the two models give different predictions and their ability to reproduce numerical results depends on the horizontal displacement probability. The topic is relevant for situations occurring in pedestrian flows or biological transport in crowded environments, where lateral displacements of the particles occur predominantly affecting therefore in an essentially way the efficiency of the overall transport mechanism.

Lattice model of reduced jamming by a barrier

We study an asymmetric simple exclusion process in a strip in the presence of a solid impenetrable barrier. We focus on the effect of the barrier on the residence time of the particles, namely, the typical time needed by the particles to cross the whole strip. We explore the conditions for reduced jamming when varying the environment (different drifts, reservoir densities, horizontal diffusion walks, etc.). In particular, we discover an interesting nonmonotonic behavior of the residence time as a function of the barrier length. Besides recovering by means of both the lattice dynamics and the mean-field model well-known aspects like the faster-is-slower effect and the intermittence of the flow, we propose also a birth-and-death process and a reduced one-dimensional (1D) model with variable barrier permeability to capture the behavior of the residence time with respect to the parameters.