Search

Permanent settlement began in southwest Asia across the end of the Pleistocene (the Epipalaeolithic) and the beginning of the Holocene (the Neolithic). Aggregation represents a transformation of the cultural niche, involving major social and cultural innovations and profound developments of the strategies of subsistence. At first, the scalar stress of living in large, permanent communities was diffused through corporate effort in the construction and maintenance of monumental communal buildings, a complex material symbolism, and increasing intensity of communal rituals; participation demonstrated commitment and conformity to community norms. As cultivated crops and managed herds of sheep and goat gradually became the predominant source of subsistence, the old sharing ethos was overtaken by the household as the central socio-economic unit; the household became the focus for ritual and symbolism. As population aggregations grew larger, their supra-regional networks of socio-economic sharing and exchange also became more complex, extensive and intensive. The new cultural niche based on networked aggregations produced a marked acceleration in both the rate of cultural accumulation and the rate of demographic growth. At the end of the Neolithic, plow-agriculture began in place of horticulture; there are the first signs of mixed agro-pastoral economies, the marking of private property, new technologies (ceramics and copper metallurgy), and, in southern Iraq, irrigation agriculture. At this time, too, the accelerating expansion of the population of farmers is marked by the appearance of their new settlements in all directions.

We analyze whether random network formation processes, such as preferential attachment, can emerge as the outcome of strategic behaviour. We represent network formation as an extensive game in which players sequentially form links as they enter the network. In this setting, we investigate under which conditions subgame perfect equilibria of the game are observationally equivalent with random network formation process. We put forward two structural conditions that are necessary in this respect. First, players must have some form of imperfect information as randomization is purposeful only if its realization is not perfectly observed by the other players. Second, there must be some form of competition between a player and its successors: a player has incentives to reduce the information available to its successors only to the extent that their objectives are in opposition. Accordingly, we put forward a class of games where players compete with their predecessors and their successors for the costs and benefits induced by link formation and show that subgame perfect equilibria of this game are observationally equivalent with random network formation process. In particular, when linkage costs are inversely proportional to the degree of a node, equilibrium play induces a preferential attachment process. This provides a positive answer to the question of the existence of strategic foundations for preferential attachment. However the very specific conditions requiredfor the observational equivalence to hold suggest that preferential attachment can be explained by strategic considerations only in a limited number of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on recent insights from network theory and on the rich dataset made available by the Panama Papers in order to investigate the micro-economic dynamics of tax-evasion. We model offshore financial entities documented in the Panama Papers as links between jurisdictions in the global network of tax evasion. A quantitative analysis shows that the resulting network, far from being a random collection of bilateral links, has key features of complex networks such as a core-periphery structure and a fat-tail degree distribution. We argue that these structural features imply that policy must adopt a systemic perspective to mitigate tax evasion. We offer three sets of insights from this perspective. First, we identify through centrality measures tax havens that ought to be priority policy targets. Second, we show that efficient tax treaties must contain exchange information clauses and link tax-havens to non-haven jurisdictions. Third, we show that the optimal deterrence strategies for a social-planner facing a strategic tax-evader in a Stackelberg competition can be characterized using the notion of Bonacich centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differssignificantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of their emergence and an understanding of their potential systemic consequences. This article focuses on one of these patterns: nestedness. Given a network of interacting nodes, nestedness can be described as the tendency for nodes to interact with subsets of the interaction partners of better-connected nodes. Known since more than 80 years in biogeography, nestedness has been found in systems as diverse as ecological mutualistic systems, world trade, inter-organizational relations, among many others. This review article focuses on three main pillars: the existing methodologies to observe nestedness in networks; the main theoretical mechanisms conceived to explain the emergence of nestedness in ecological and socio-economic networks; the implications of a nested topology of interactions for the stability and feasibility of a given interacting system. We survey results from variegated disciplines, including statistical physics, graph theory, ecology, and theoretical economics. Nestedness was found to emerge both in bipartite networks and, more recently, in unipartite ones; this review is the first comprehensive attempt to unify both streams of studies, usually disconnected from each other. We believe that the truly interdisciplinary endeavor – while rooted in a complex systems perspective – may inspire new models and algorithms whose realm of application will undoubtedly transcend disciplinary boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today’s patterns of work are very much defined by the ‘lean enterprise’ practice, taking form in organizations that are more competitive, customer-driven and agile on the one hand (Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2007). Lean Solutions. New York: Simon & Schuster), and the separation of work from time and space on the other (Hochschild, A. (1997). The time bind. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books). Concepts like work and workspace are subject to an evolving nature and get a new meaning (Kirsh, D. (2000). A few thoughts on cognitive overload. Intellectia, 1(30), 19-51). This triggered the rise of new working spaces, fuelled by the aftermath of the global economic crisis that transformed the practices and meanings of work. Nevertheless, this applies only to particular sectors. This paper builds on the case of Genk, an important economic pole in the Limburg Region of Belgium. The development in the region has always been related to labour-intensive industrial activities. In light of these working shifts targeting mainly big companies/employers, Genk has turned a blind eye on the local proprietors. What about the small entrepreneurs/community economies addressing mainly the local clientele? What evolution do we see in their working pattern? By using a specific visualization tool, a series of interviews were conducted in order to explore in a playful way, existing social and economic networks. The interviews reveal networks that shape a coworking model. The paper will further present the scale of this ‘coworking’ phenomenon experienced in Genk, perceived to be the ‘new model of coworking’ in the context of the collaborative and sharing economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estudio de los perfiles socioeconómicos, actividades empresariales, estrategias de cohesión y vínculos cooperativos establecidos entre los principales agentes fiscales originarios de Castilla la Nueva que intervinieron en la gestión de la tesorería general de la Hermandad, en el marco de construcción de redes financieras caracterizadas por su diferente rango territorial (local, nacional e internacional).This study examines the socio-economic profiles, business activities, corporate strategies and links between the main financial agents from New Castile who managed the general treasury of the «Hermandad» within the context of the creation of financial networks at different territorial levels (local, national and international).

Climate change is one of the most daunting challenges human kind has ever faced. In the paper, we provide a survey of the micro and macro economics of climate change from a complexity science perspective and we discuss the challenges ahead for this line of research. We identify four areas of the literature where complex system models have already produced valuable insights: (i) coalition formation and climate negotiations, (ii) macroeconomic impacts of climate-related events, (iii) energy markets and (iv) diffusion of climate-friendly technologies. On each of these issues, accounting for heterogeneity, interactions and disequilibrium dynamics provides a complementary and novel perspective to the one of standard equilibrium models. Furthermore, it highlights the potential economic benefits of mitigation and adaptation policies and the risk of under-estimating systemic climate change-related risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Lee Teng Hwee and Ho Pao Jin, two "trans-local" activist educational reformers, in order to explore the interaction between changing social networks, governments, and educational reform movements in Shanghai, Singapore, and Malacca at critical moments between the 1880s and 1930s. Lee, as Fudan University President, and Ho, as Shanghai Student Union President, were key actors in the 1919 protest movement. Both were sons of families engaged in trans-regional trade, Lee moving from Batavia to Singapore, America, and Shanghai and Ho moving from Xiamen to Singapore, Shanghai, America, and Malacca. My purpose is to show how the shifting socio-economic networks and political structures and the activities of these educational reformers influenced each other, drawing on and contributing to local and trans-local experience. As these contributors were flexible in adapting to circumstances as they pursued their goals, we should also be flexible in our analysis of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show that a comprehensive analysis of temporal network evolution requires to consider measures of non-structural changes, in addition to classical topological indicators. We employ a recently proposed measure of non-structural dynamics, together with other structural indicators, to analyze the time evolution of three subnetworks, extracted from the Italian corporate board network. Consistently with recent literature, we show that, to different extent, both structural and non-structural changes are present and must be accounted for, in order to get a satisfactory description of their temporal evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of measuring temporal dynamics of complex socio-economic relational systems, represented as time-dependent networks. Network dynamics is first splitted into a structural component, accounting for changes in the network topology, and a non-structural component, accounting for permutation of vertex labels. A quantitative measure of the dynamics and its components is then proposed and it is shown how it can be used to investigate and interpret the time evolution of networks. A real example is discussed, pertaining to the dynamics of a subnetwork of the Italian corporate board network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie III, Historia Medieval is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: We analyze the correlations in patterns of trading for members of the Italian interbank trading platform e-MID. The trading strategy of a particular member institution is defined as the sequence of (intra-) daily net trading volumes within a certain semester. Based on this definition, we show that there are significant and persistent bilateral correlations between institutions’ trading strategies. In most semesters we find two clusters, with positively (negatively) correlated trading strategies within (between) clusters. We show that the two clusters mostly contain continuous net buyers and net sellers of money, respectively, and that cluster memberships of individual banks are highly persistent. Additionally, we highlight some problems related to our definition of trading strategies. Our findings add further evidence on the fact that preferential lending relationships on the micro-level lead to community structure on the macro-level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Based on fieldwork among Ulaanbaatar's dispossessed youth, this article explores the 'work of hope' in post-socialist Mongolia. Using anthropological writings on presentism and hope as my theoretical point of departure, I show how the concept of hope allows for the potentials of the moment to overflow the possibilities of the present. The article describes a number of lucky-and not so lucky-events that took place during a day spent with a group of young men cruising around the city in an old Cadillac. Hope emerges as a social method for momentarily integrating heterogeneous assemblages otherwise dispersed across the post-socialist city-in this case, people's metaphysical capacities and their economic assets-into chains of creditors and debtors, which are only barely holding together within an overarching context of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of specialized production strategies in the development of socio-economic inequalities in Bronze Age south-eastern (SE) Arabia, and particularly, the ways in which a localized, internal exchange economy may have produced stress and instability in the SE Arabian socio-economic system. While archaeological research has established that the communities of SE Arabia participated in a widespread Bronze Age exchange system that included areas of the ancient Near East, South Asia, and Central Asia, it is unclear to what degree this interaction fostered the broad-scale socio-economic changes seen in the Early Bronze Age of SE Arabia. Here we present the results of an agent-based model that suggest the nature of the internal exchange economy in SE Arabia itself may have precipitated the social conditions necessary for change by allowing individuals to profit disproportionately. We thus emphasize the importance of local production strategies in generating socio-economic change, in addition to the well-established economic and cultural contacts with the wider Bronze Age world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Tourism destination networks are amongst the most complex dynamical systems, involving a myriad of human-made and natural resources. In this work we report a complex network-based systematic analysis of the Elba (Italy) tourism destination network, including the characterization of its structure in terms of several traditional measurements, the investigation of its modularity, as well as its comprehensive study in terms of the recently reported superedges approach. In particular, structural (the number of paths of distinct lengths between pairs of nodes, as well as the number of reachable companies) and dynamical features (transition probabilities and the inward/outward activations and accessibilities) are measured and analyzed, leading to a series of important findings related to the interactions between tourism companies. Among the several reported results, it is shown that the type and size of the companies influence strongly their respective activations and accessibilities, while their geographical position does not seem to matter. It is also shown that the Elba tourism network is largely fragmented and heterogeneous, so that it could benefit from increased integration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Proximities’ influence on the construction of socio-economic networks provokes many debates in the literature. The present contribution aims to study the functioning of coordination between actors in support systems for agricultural sectors and to highlight the impact of a public policy of territorial development on these devices, with the help of an approach in terms of networks and proximities. For that, we analyze the Local Productive Arrangements (LPAs) of an agricultural sector in the Brazilian Amazon, supported by a territorial governance mechanism. The mobilized analysis framework allows us to study and compare LPAs, to characterize the types of networks according to the types of proximities and to highlight the importance of the territorial governance mechanism for strengthening and sustaining LPAs.