In the XVIII century Nicolas de Condorcet, French mathematician and philosopher, described an interesting situation, which is most widely known as the voting paradox. This situation is a perfect example of how the otherwise logical human behavior, on the individual level, can be easily destroyed by collective behavior, on the global level. We would naturally assume that the micro-level logic would rise bottom-up, yet it doesn't and that is a paradox!
Previously we wrote about few of the most well known and used network formation models [1]: Erdos-Renyi, Watts-Strogatz, Barabasi-Albert, core-periphery network and cellular network models. All these models are somewhat stylized and very simple - they are able to reproduce just some small part of actual complexity observed in the social networks. Thus it might be convenient to combine these models into hybrid network formation models, which then would be able to reproduce more empirically observed features.
One of the first steps away from the simple models and towards a more realistic models might be introduction of the local interactions. For example into the Barabasi-Albert model. Recall that in this model we had to keep track of the degrees of each node. But is it possible to have this information in real life? What would happen if we wouldn't have this information, but would explore the network through the random selection (just like in the Erdos-Renyi model)?
Topic: "Physics of Risk: The more physics, the less risk"
Speaker: Aleksejus Kononovicius
Briefly: I will talk about the complexity of socio-economic systems and how physicists (and not only physicists) attempt to understand, describe and explain it. I will present some of the research done worldwide and also research done at VU ITPA.
When? 6th of November, 19:00
Where? Cafe "Savas Kampas" (Vokiečių st. 4, Vilnius)
Organized by: VU Faculty of Physics Students Scientific Association
Facebook event: here
Slides: Download (without video; Lithuanian)
US based business and technology news website "Business Insider" reports that "They finally tested the prisoner's dilemma on actual prisoners - and the results were not what you would expect"! Read more on businessinsider.com »
Rare events tend to make our everyday lives somewhat more complicated. The problem is that usually those event are unavoidable, but the nice thing is that they are extremely rare. In certain system some small deviations, which occur more frequently than the aforementioned "rare events", may be amplified in a way to cause a catastrophe. The financial markets are on of such systems - they are intrinsically highly complex. The article developing these ideas was published on ekonomika.lt, thus we would like to suggest reading it (though note that the article is written in Lithuanian).
Physics of risk, complexity and socio-economic systems.