Army ants are characterized by a complex combination of behavioral and morphological traits. Molecular data now indicate that army ant behavior has a unique evolutionary origin and has been conserved for over more than 100 million years.

Despite the current growth of graphic novel popularity with teens and the increasing representation of the LGBTQ community in those graphic novels, there has been little work done to evaluate these works in terms of how the LGBTQ characters are presented. Using Jenkins’s adaptations of Lerner’s, Bishop’s, and Chauncey’s frameworks—as well as Jenkins’s own framework that combined these three for...

This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and accidental omissions in the construction of the list. The estimates suggest that appearing on the bestseller list results in a...

Digitization is transforming the market for books. Lower marginal costs have reduced prices by 10-15 percent in the past four years, and digitization has given creators the ability to circumvent traditional gatekeepers and publish their work directly. The number of self-published works has grown by almost 300 percent since 2006 and now exceeds the number of traditionally published works. While ...

Ordered lists of objects are widely used as representational forms. Such ordered objects include Web search results or bestseller lists. We survey distances and probabilistic distributions that are designed for orders or rankings.

Herd behavior, i.e. everyone is doing what everyone else is doing (Banerjee 1992), portrays various social and economic situations where individuals are markedly influenced by the decisions of others, such as in financial investment, technology adoption, firms’ strategic decisions, political voting, and dining and fashion trends. When there are two restaurants next to each other, customers ofte...

A large number of novels are being uploaded as online novels. The present paper proposes a ranking algorithm based on the users’ favorite lists (bookmarks). Empirical evaluation has been conducted with respect to each genre of novels. In several genres, it is confirmed that the top ranked novels in July are predicted from the bookmarks of May.