Related papers: A Creepy World
Many complex systems exhibit extreme events far more often than expected for a normal distribution. This work examines how self-similar bursts of activity across several orders of magnitude can emerge from first principles in systems that…
Disordered materials are often out of equilibrium and evolve very slowly. This allows a memory of the imposed strains or preparation conditions to be encoded in the material. Here we consider "directed aging", where the elastic properties…
For this special issue, the article aims at discussing a few econophysics problems studied so far rather successfully. The following "applications" in micro-econo-physics are considered : (i) financial crashes; it is emphasized that one can…
Dynamical systems can be prone to severe fluctuations due to the presence of chaotic dynamics. This paper explains for a toy chaotic economic model how such a system can be regulated by the application of relatively weak control to keep the…
We present an analytic formalism that describes the evolution of the stellar, gas, and metal content of galaxies. It is based on the idea, inspired by hydrodynamic simulations, that galaxies live in a slowly-evolving equilibrium between…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Prediction of events in financial markets is every investor's dream and, usually, wishful thinking. From a more general, economic and societal viewpoint, the identification of indicators for large events is highly desirable to assess…
Order can spontaneously emerge from seemingly noisy interactions between biological agents, like a flock of birds changing their direction of flight in unison, without a leader or an external cue. We are interested in the generic conditions…
We propose a simple "evolutionary" sandpile model exhibiting self-organised criticality and exactly $1/f$-noise (i.e. the critical exponent is equal to $-1$) and observe emergent phenomena of the same type self-organised criticality on the…
Following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily…
Trust lies at the crux of most economic transactions, with credit markets being a notable example. Drawing on insights from the literature on coordination games and network growth, we develop a simple model to clarify how trust breaks down…
Catastrophic events, though rare, do occur and when they occur, they have devastating effects. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to understand the complexity of the underlying dynamics and signatures of catastrophic events, such as…
Financial markets typically exhibit dynamically complex properties as they undergo continuous interactions with economic and environmental factors. The Efficient Market Hypothesis indicates a rich difference in the structural complexity of…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
Many natural phenomena evolve intermittently, with periods of tranquillity interrupted by bursts of activity, rather than following a smooth gradual path. Examples include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares, gamma-ray bursts, and…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
A model of an evolving network of interacting molecular species is shown to exhibit repeated rounds of crashes in which several species get rapidly depopulated, followed by recoveries. The network inevitably self-organizes into an…
Catastrophic transitions, where a system shifts abruptly between alternate steady states, are a generic feature of many nonlinear systems. Recently these regime shift were suggested as the mechanism underlies many ecological catastrophes,…
The long-term behaviour of dynamic systems can be classified in two different regimes, regular or chaotic, depending on the values of the control parameters, which are kept constant during the time evolution. Starting from slightly…