What makes Individual I's a Collective We; Coordination mechanisms & costs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yoon, Jisung, Kempes, Chris, Yang, Vicky Chuqiao, Lee, Seoul, West, Geoffrey, Youn, Hyejin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Yoon, Jisung
Kempes, Chris
Yang, Vicky Chuqiao
Lee, Seoul
West, Geoffrey
Youn, Hyejin
author_facet Yoon, Jisung
Kempes, Chris
Yang, Vicky Chuqiao
Lee, Seoul
West, Geoffrey
Youn, Hyejin
contents The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination occurs implicitly. Here, we analyze the non-functional actions of contributors, administrators, and bots on Wikipedia, categorizing them by their asymmetric authority: one-way oversight and two-way. This categorization helps us reveal comparable patterns. First, we find remarkably consistent scaling factors for each category relative to system size. Two-way coordination scales superlinearly (with an exponent of $1.3$), while oversight coordination grows sublinearly (with an exponent of $0.9$), suggesting an underlying mechanism for coordination across communities. Second, we identify the hierarchical modular structure of interactions as a key factor for the economy of scale in coordination, and we propose a mathematical model to explain these results. Finally, our temporal analysis shows a shift from two-way interactions to one-way oversight as system size increases. This suggests the emergence of a nascent hierarchical structure even in self-organizing systems, echoing Weber's theory of organizational evolution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_02113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What makes Individual I's a Collective We; Coordination mechanisms & costs
Yoon, Jisung
Kempes, Chris
Yang, Vicky Chuqiao
Lee, Seoul
West, Geoffrey
Youn, Hyejin
Physics and Society
The collective effort exceeds the sum of its parts when individuals coordinate and regulate their activities and behaviors. This holds true even in self-organizing systems with open, voluntary participation where coordination occurs implicitly. Here, we analyze the non-functional actions of contributors, administrators, and bots on Wikipedia, categorizing them by their asymmetric authority: one-way oversight and two-way. This categorization helps us reveal comparable patterns. First, we find remarkably consistent scaling factors for each category relative to system size. Two-way coordination scales superlinearly (with an exponent of $1.3$), while oversight coordination grows sublinearly (with an exponent of $0.9$), suggesting an underlying mechanism for coordination across communities. Second, we identify the hierarchical modular structure of interactions as a key factor for the economy of scale in coordination, and we propose a mathematical model to explain these results. Finally, our temporal analysis shows a shift from two-way interactions to one-way oversight as system size increases. This suggests the emergence of a nascent hierarchical structure even in self-organizing systems, echoing Weber's theory of organizational evolution.
title What makes Individual I's a Collective We; Coordination mechanisms & costs
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02113