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A Day at the Beach: Human Agents Self-Organizing on the Sand Pile

In this paper, we analyze the sand pile model of self-organized criticallity from a social scientific perspective. In the sand pile model, particles of sand land at random locations on a square table and self-organize into a critical state: a conical pile. Thereafter, the size of avalanches satisfies a power law. This empirical fact has led some to claim that self-organizing criticality explains power law distributions that occur in human systems. However, unlike grains of sand, people possess both preferences and the ability to act purposefully given those preferences. We find that by including purposive agents and allowing heterogeneity of purposes, the sand pile need not become critical. We also show that if we allow institutions to moderate actions that we can create any distribution of avalanches.