Related papers: The Prosumer Economy -- Being Like a Forest

The global production of electric goods is at an all-time high, causing negative environmental and health impacts as well as a continuing depletion of natural resources. Considering the worsening global climate change, a transition of…

With the advance of industrial mass production, modern micro-electronics and computers, the intervals between the release of new generations of consumer products have been dramatically reduced and so have their lifetime cycles. While it was…

With the advent of prosumers, the traditional centralized operation may become impracticable due to computational burden, privacy concerns, and conflicting interests. In this paper, an energy sharing mechanism is proposed to accommodate…

Mapping pathways to achieving the sustainable development goals requires understanding and predicting how social, economic and political factors impact biodiversity. Trends in demography, economic growth, regional alliances and consumption…

The unfolding climate crisis is a physical manifestation of the damage that market economy, driven by the high intensity consumption of fossil fuels, has inflicted on the Earth System and on the stability conditions that were established by…

A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…

In this book, we outline a model of a non-capitalist market economy based on not-for-profit forms of business. This work presents both a critique of the current economic system and a vision of a more socially, economically, and ecologically…

Achieving a successful energetic transition through a smarter and greener electricity grid is a major goal for the 21st century. It is assumed that such smart grids will be characterized by bidirectional electricity flows coupled with the…

Ecosystems around the world are at risk of critical transitions due to increasing anthropogenic pressures and climate change. Yet it is unclear where the risks are higher or where in the world ecosystems are more vulnerable. Here I measure…

Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…

Security and safety are intertwined concepts in the world of computing. In recent years, the terms "sustainable security" and "sustainable safety" came into fashion and are being used referring to a variety of systems properties ranging…

This paper studies how to aggregate prosumers (or large consumers) and their collective decisions in electricity markets, with a focus on fairness. Fairness is essential for prosumers to participate in aggregation schemes. Some prosumers…

Functions or 'functionings' enable to give a structure to any activity and their combinations constitute the capabilities which characterize economic assets such as work utility. The basic law of supply and demand naturally emerges from…

In smart energy communities, households of a particular geographical location make a cooperative group to achieve the community's social welfare. Prosumers are the users that both consume and produce energy. In this paper, we develop…

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, ushered by the deeper integration of digital technologies into professional and social spaces, provides an opportunity to meaningfully serve society. Humans have tremendous capability to innovatively…

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…

Here, we address the essential question of whether, in the context of evolving populations, ecosystems attain properties that enable persistence of the ecosystem itself. We use a simple ecosystem model describing resource, producer, and…

Transformative changes in our production and consumption habits are needed to halt biodiversity loss. Organizations are the way we humans have organized our everyday life, and much of our negative environmental impacts, also called carbon…

In a so-called overpopulated world, sustainable consumption is of existential importance.However, the expanding spectrum of product choices and their production complexity challenge consumers to make informed and value-sensitive decisions.…

In this chapter the complex systems are discussed in the context of economic and business policy and decision making. It will be showed and motivated that social systems are typically chaotic, non-linear and/or non-equilibrium and therefore…