Related papers: Big is Fragile: An Attempt at Theorizing Scale
Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…
Financial crises are a recurrent phenomenon with important effects on the real economy. The financial system is inherently fragile and it is therefore of great importance to be able to measure and characterize its systemic stability.…
In contrast with robust systems that resist noise or fragile systems that break with noise, antifragility is defined as a property of complex systems that benefit from noise or disorder. Here we define and test a simple measure of…
We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firm sources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Individual supply relationships are at risk of idiosyncratic failure, which threatens to…
Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations. Antifragility carries a precise definition that quantifies a system's output response to input variability. Systems…
Percolation is a fundamental concept that brought new understanding on the robustness properties of complex systems. Here we consider percolation on weakly interacting networks, that is, network layers coupled together by much less…
Will a large economy be stable? Building on Robert May's original argument for large ecosystems, we conjecture that evolutionary and behavioural forces conspire to drive the economy towards marginal stability. We study networks of firms in…
Measuring systemic risk or fragility of financial systems is a ubiquitous task of fundamental importance in analyzing market efficiency, portfolio allocation, and containment of financial contagions. Recent attempts have shown that…
As it is known in the finance risk and macroeconomics literature, risk-sharing in large portfolios may increase the probability of creation of default clusters and of systemic risk. We review recent developments on mathematical and…
Antifragile systems grow measurably better in the presence of hazards. This is in contrast to fragile systems which break down in the presence of hazards, robust systems that tolerate hazards up to a certain degree, and resilient systems…
The goal of this paper is to study and define the concept of "antifragile software". For this, I start from Taleb's statement that antifragile systems love errors, and discuss whether traditional software dependability fits into this class.…
Socio-technical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness -- i.e., system…
Poor economies not only produce less; they typically produce things that involve fewer inputs and fewer intermediate steps. Yet the supply chains of poor countries face more frequent disruptions---delivery failures, faulty parts, delays,…
A key quality of any kind of system is its ability to deliver its respective service correctly. Often the unavailability of commercial systems may lead to lost revenue, which are minor compared to what may be at stake when critical…
Engineering projects are the result of the combined effort of their members. Yet, it has been documented that labor division withing projects is unevenly distributed: some project members are specialists undertaking only few tasks, whereas…
A system is called antifragile when damage acts as a constructive element improving the performance of a global function. In this paper, we analyze the emergence of antifragility in the movement of random walkers on networks with modular…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
One of the basic principles of risk management is that we should always keep an eye on ways that things could go badly wrong, even if they seem unlikely. The more disastrous a potential failure, the more improbable it needs to be, before we…
The prevalent view in the economics literature is that a high level of infrastructure investment is a precursor to economic growth. China is especially held up as a model to emulate. Based on the largest dataset of its kind, this paper…
The paper analyses the increasing popularity of large funds in the secondary private equity market, which are pegged on the perceived larger scale advantages of operational efficiency and fewer manager relationships (Reuter & Zitzewitz,…