Related papers: Contagious disruptions and complexity traps in eco…
The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the…
Social contagion is a ubiquitous and fundamental process that drives individual and social changes. Although social contagion arises as a result of cognitive processes and biases, the integration of cognitive mechanisms with the theory of…
In this paper, we propose a dynamical model to capture cascading failures among interconnected organizations in the global financial system. Failures can take the form of bankruptcies, defaults, and other insolvencies. The network that…
We create a network model to study the spread of an epidemic through physically proximate and accidental daily human contacts in a city, and simulate outcomes for two kinds of agents - poor and non-poor. Under non-intervention, peak…
This paper investigates how market competition influences poverty dynamics using a functional econometric framework that captures both contemporaneous and lagged effects. Using annual data for 48 countries from 1991-2017, we estimate…
Behavioral adoptions are influenced by peers in different ways. While some individuals may change after a single incoming influence, others need multiple cumulated attempts. These two mechanism, known as the simple and the complex…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
The latest financial crisis has painfully revealed the dangers arising from a globally interconnected financial system. Conventional approaches based on the notion of the existence of equilibrium and those which rely on statistical…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
In complex systems, many different parts interact in non-obvious ways. Traditional research focuses on a few or a single aspect of the problem so as to analyze it with the tools available. To get a better insight of phenomena that emerge…
Economic complexity has been linked to sustainability outcomes, such as income inequality and greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, it is unclear whether the pursuit of complex and/or related activities naturally aligns with these outcomes, or…
The current global financial system forms a highly interconnected network where a default in one of its nodes can propagate to many other nodes, causing a catastrophic avalanche effect. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the…
Network structure can affect when and how widely new ideas, products, and behaviors are adopted. In widely-used models of biological contagion, interventions that randomly rewire edges (on average making them "longer") accelerate spread.…
Social and economic networks are often multiplexed, meaning that people are connected by different types of relationships -- such as borrowing goods and giving advice. We make two contributions to the study of multiplexing and the…
In today's global economy, supply chain (SC) entities have become increasingly interconnected with demand and supply relationships due to the need for strategic outsourcing. Such interdependence among firms not only increases efficiency but…
The universal prevalence of cooperation is puzzling, as defection typically yields higher payoffs than cooperation, motivating searches for hidden pathways to cooperation. Here we study a game-theoretic model on a lattice structured…
An enduring challenge in contagion theory is that the pathways contagions follow through social networks exhibit emergent complexities that are difficult to predict using network structure. Here, we address this challenge by developing a…
Natural and anthropogenic disasters frequently affect both the supply and demand side of an economy. A striking recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic which has created severe disruptions to economic output in most countries. These direct…
We describe a new complex system model of an evolving production economy. This model is the simplest we can envisage which incorporates the new observation that the rate of an economic production process depends only on the minimum of its…