Related papers: Self-organized Collapse of Societies
Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over time. However, social contagions--the spread of ideas, beliefs, innovations--can lose or gain in momentum as they spread: ideas can get reinforced, beliefs…
The existence of involuntary unemployment advocated by J. M. Keynes is a very important problem of the modern economic theory. Using a three-generations overlapping generations model, we show that the existence of involuntary unemployment…
Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this…
Models that explain the economical and political realities of nowadays societies should help all the world's citizens. Yet, the last four years showed that the current models are missing. Here we develop a dynamical society-deciders model…
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…
We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is…
We study the effect of random perturbations in the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model. HANDY models the interactions between human population, depletion, and consumption of natural resources. HANDY explains how endogenous human--nature…
The formation and stability of social hierarchies is a question of general relevance. Here, we propose a simple generalized theoretical model for establishing social hierarchy via pair-wise interactions between individuals and investigate…
The scale and terms of aggregate borrowing in an economy depend on the manner in which wealth is distributed across potential creditors with heterogeneous beliefs about the future. This distribution evolves over time as uncertainty is…
Measures of wealth and production have been found to scale superlinearly with the population of a city. Therefore, it makes economic sense for humans to congregate together in dense settlements. A recent model of population dynamics showed…
Economy is demanding new models, able to understand and predict the evolution of markets. To this respect, Econophysics offers models of markets as complex systems, that try to comprehend macro-, system-wide states of the economy from the…
Power law distributions of macroscopic observables are ubiquitous in both the natural and social sciences. They are indicative of correlated, cooperative phenomena between groups of interacting agents at the microscopic level. In this paper…
This Chapter reviews statistical models for the probability distribution of money developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. In these models, economic transactions are modeled as random transfers of money between the…
Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
How do networks of relationships evolve over time? We analyse a dataset tracking the social interactions of 900 individuals over four years. Despite continuous shifts in individual relationships, the macroscopic structural properties of the…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
This paper deals with the modeling of social competition, possibly resulting in the onset of extreme conflicts. More precisely, we discuss models describing the interplay between individual competition for wealth distribution that, when…
Is a causal description of human wealth history conceivable? To investigate the matter we introduce a simple causal albeit strongly aggregated model, assuming that the observed wealth growth is mainly driven by human collaborative efforts…
This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that…