During summer we have promised to talk about impact of talent and luck on the individual success. This is the first post in the series, which will introduce you to a rather abstract model, which links all these three concepts. Admittedly, the model is really general and thus detached from actual economic or social realities. Therefore this model is not suitable for any policy making, but is perfect for a general discussion on the topic.

Talent vs Luck model was introduced by a group of Italian researchers in [1].

How often football commentators say something along the lines "striker has to score from here", "it was an easy stop for goalkeeper" or "it was an excellent opportunity"? How many times have you cursed, because your favorite team missed an obvious chance to take the lead? In a tense game, both we (the fans) and the commentators tend to give the way to emotions and leave rational thinking on the bench. Yet with the modern technology and understanding of statistics it is quite possible to calculate odds of scoring a goal in a particular situation.

Watch this video by Opta in which their metric "expected goals" is explained. Though it is not very detailed explanation, but it could spark your own imagination.

Let us close this year with a model proposed by us and which is based on the Kirman model. The main difference from the original model is that here we have multiple state dynamics. Yet unlike in our three state approach to the financial markets (see the initial post here or the article [1]) this time we allow any number of states to be defined in the model [2, 3].

Significant portion of our works in the last decade are based on the Kirman model, which itself is inspired by the behavior of social insects. Experiments which inspired Kirman to formulate his agent-based model actually used ant colonies as their observation object (recall our first post on the Kirman model). Now it appears that scientists at MIT are doing the opposite - using ants as a living agent-based model.

Let us briefly come back to the Deffuant's model and look at one of its common generalizations. Namely let us allow tolerance to vary. Varying tolerance to different opinions would be a rather natural assumption as it is usually hard to persuade a radical, while it is somewhat easier to persuade a moderate.