Related papers: A Policy Compass for Ecological Economics

In this paper we address how complex social communities emerge from local decisions by individuals with limited attention and knowledge. This problem is critical; if we understand community formation mechanisms, it may be possible to…

We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…

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…

Footprints provide a way to estimate the relative impact of processes and products on the global climate. Including footprint analysis in a course on energy simultaneously provides students with an understanding of this tool and a…

Ecosystems are complex systems, currently experiencing several threats associated with global warming, intensive exploitation, and human-driven habitat degradation. Such threats are pushing ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Because of a…

We introduce three concepts that describe an agent's incentives: response incentives indicate which variables in the environment, such as sensitive demographic information, affect the decision under the optimal policy. Instrumental control…

The competitive advantages in a knowledge-based economy can no longer be attributed to single nodes in the network. Political economies are increasingly reshaped by knowledge-based developments that upset market equilibria and institutional…

Economic transformation -- change in what an economy produces -- is foundational to development and rising standards of living. Our understanding of this process has been propelled recently by two branches of work in the field of economic…

Increasing urbanization puts pressure on cities to prioritize sustainable growth and avoid carbon lock-in. Available modeling frameworks fall acutely of guiding such pivotal decision-making at the local level. Financial incentives,…

This paper deals with the issue of ecological bias in ecological inference. We provide an explicit formulation of the conditions required for the ordinary ecological regression to produce unbiased estimates and argue that, when these…

Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…

Great socio-economic transitions see the demise of certain industries and the rise of others. The losers of the transition tend to deploy a variety of tactics to obstruct change. We develop a political-economy model of interest group…

We introduce an epistemic information measure between two data streams, that we term $influence$. Closely related to transfer entropy, the measure must be estimated by epistemic agents with finite memory resources via sampling accessible…

Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the…

There are visible changes in the world organization, environment and health of national conscience that create a background for discussion on possible redefinition of global, state and regional management goals. The author applies the…

Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiplicity of objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the…

This paper presents a novel quantitative approach for comparative economic studies, addressing limitations in current classification methods. Conventional approaches in comparative economics often rely on ad hoc and categorical…

The benefits of using complex network analysis (CNA) to study complex systems, such as an economy, have become increasingly evident in recent years. However, the lack of a single comparative index that encompasses the overall wellness of a…

The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…

The infrastructure upon which the functioning of society depends is composed of complex ecosystems of systems. Consequently, we must reason about the properties of such ecosystems, which requires that we construct models of them. There are…