In this paper we focus on the beneficial role of random strategies in social sciences by means of simple mathematical and computational models. We briefly review recent results obtained by two of us in previous contributions for the case of the Peter principle and the efficiency of a Parliament....

Building on similarities between earthquakes and extreme financial events, we use a self-organized criticality-generating model to study herding and avalanche dynamics in financial markets. We consider a community of interacting investors, distributed on a small-world network, who bet on the...

The Brain Drain phenomenon is particularly heterogeneous and is characterized by peculiar specifications. It influences the economic fundamentals of both the country of origin and the host one in terms of human capital accumulation. Here, the brain drain is considered from a microeconomic...

In order to analyse the behaviour of pedestrians at the very fine scale, while moving along the streets, in open spaces or inside a building, simulation modelling becomes an essential tool. In these spatial environments, simulation requires the ability to model the local dynamics of individual...

We discuss the role of the initial conditions for the dynamical anomalies observed in the quasi-stationary states of the Hamiltonian mean field (HMF) model.

We briefly discuss the state of the art on the anomalous dynamics of the Hamiltonian mean field (HMF) model. We stress the important role of the initial conditions for understanding the microscopic nature of the intriguing metastable quasi-stationary states (QSS) observed in the model and the...

We discuss the glassy dynamics recently found in the meta-equilibrium quasi-stationary states (QSS) of the HMF model. The relevance of the initial conditions and the connection with Tsallis nonextensive thermostatistics is also addressed.

We discuss an effective spin-glass Hamiltonian which can be used to study the glassy-like dynamics observed in the metastable states of the Hamiltonian mean field (HMF) model. By means of the Replica formalism, we were able to find a self-consistent equation for the glassy order parameter which...