New Economic Geography meets Comecon: Regional Wages and Industry Location in Central Europe

We analyze the internal spatial wage and employment structures of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia, using regional data for 1996-2000. A new economic geography model predicts wage gradients and specialization patterns that are smoothly related to regions' relative market access. As an alternative, we formulate a "Comecon hypothesis", according to which wages and sectoral location are not systematically related to market access except for discrete concentrations in capital regions. Our estimations confirm the ongoing relevance of the Comecon hypothesis: compared to pre-2004 EU members, Central European countries' average wages and service employment were still discretely higher in capital regions. Our results point towards an increase in relative wages and employment shares of Central Europe's provincial regions, favoring particularly those that are proximate to the large markets of incumbent EU members.regional wages; industry location; transition economies; Central Europe; new economic geography

The influence of topology and information diffusion on networked game dynamics

This thesis studies the influence of topology and information diffusion on the strategic interactions of agents in a population. It shows that there exists a reciprocal relationship between the topology, information diffusion and the strategic interactions of a population of players. In order to evaluate the influence of topology and information flow on networked game dynamics, strategic games are simulated on populations of players where the players are distributed in a non-homogeneous spatial arrangement. The initial component of this research consists of a study of evolution of the coordination of strategic players, where the topology or the structure of the population is shown to be critical in defining the coordination among the players. Next, the effect of network topology on the evolutionary stability of strategies is studied in detail. Based on the results obtained, it is shown that network topology plays a key role in determining the evolutionary stability of a particular strategy in a population of players. Then, the effect of network topology on the optimum placement of strategies is studied. Using genetic optimisation, it is shown that the placement of strategies in a spatially distributed population of players is crucial in maximising the collective payoff of the population. Exploring further the effect of network topology and information diffusion on networked games, the non-optimal or bounded rationality of players is modelled using topological and directed information flow of the network. Based on the topologically distributed bounded rationality model, it is shown that the scale-free and small-world networks emerge in randomly connected populations of sub-optimal players. Thus, the topological and information theoretic interpretations of bounded rationality suggest the topology, information diffusion and the strategic interactions of socio-economical structures are cyclically interdependent

The influence of topology and information diffusion on networked game dynamics

This thesis studies the influence of topology and information diffusion on the strategic interactions of agents in a population. It shows that there exists a reciprocal relationship between the topology, information diffusion and the strategic interactions of a population of players. In order to evaluate the influence of topology and information flow on networked game dynamics, strategic games are simulated on populations of players where the players are distributed in a non-homogeneous spatial arrangement. The initial component of this research consists of a study of evolution of the coordination of strategic players, where the topology or the structure of the population is shown to be critical in defining the coordination among the players. Next, the effect of network topology on the evolutionary stability of strategies is studied in detail. Based on the results obtained, it is shown that network topology plays a key role in determining the evolutionary stability of a particular strategy in a population of players. Then, the effect of network topology on the optimum placement of strategies is studied. Using genetic optimisation, it is shown that the placement of strategies in a spatially distributed population of players is crucial in maximising the collective payoff of the population. Exploring further the effect of network topology and information diffusion on networked games, the non-optimal or bounded rationality of players is modelled using topological and directed information flow of the network. Based on the topologically distributed bounded rationality model, it is shown that the scale-free and small-world networks emerge in randomly connected populations of sub-optimal players. Thus, the topological and information theoretic interpretations of bounded rationality suggest the topology, information diffusion and the strategic interactions of socio-economical structures are cyclically interdependent

Impact of Changing Facets of Inter-firm Interactions on Manufacturing Excellence: A Social Network Perspective of Indian Automotive Industry.

The inherent complexity of the innovation process puts interaction among firms and their specificities concerning the patterns of interaction at the center-stage. Hence, an uncovering of the interactive pattern among firms in the industry may reveal many hidden patterns, viz., the existing dependence and dominance structure of firms and the evolving dynamical changes based their on. Guided by these, this paper studies the vertical relational structure of automotive and auto component firms in Indian automotive supply chain where a clear ‘unequal balance of power’ is observed. We find that the industry network shows some prominent scale-free structural properties and complex dynamical behaviour. While analyzing further the Indian automotive industry’s possible evolutionary features we draw innovation and sustainability characteristics of this network, its inclination towards vulnerability and other policy implications.

Electricity Internal Market in the European Union: What to do next?

Like in the US, the EU “internal electricity market” remains unfinished and its construction can stall, fracturing into “national blocks” separated by permanent “border effects”. This is exactly what this paper seeks to avoid in the expected life of the current European Commission (2005-2009). It identifies the critical factors: national and EU market designs, industry structure and competition policy, deeper regional cooperation between TSOs and Regulators. It suggests 8 priority actions and 12 secondary improvements to sustain the dynamics of the construction of an EU set of open r egional markets with limited “border effects”, and explains the rationale for these recommendations

Geometric detection of hierarchical backbones in real networks

Hierarchies permeate the structure of real networks, whose nodes can be ranked according to different features. However, networks are far from treelike structures and the detection of hierarchical ordering remains a challenge, hindered by the small-world property and the presence of a large number of cycles, in particular clustering. Here, we use geometric representations of undirected networks to achieve an enriched interpretation of hierarchy that integrates features defining the popularity of nodes and similarity between them, such that the more similar a node is to a less popular neighbor the higher the hierarchical load of the relationship. The geometric approach allows us to measure the local contribution of nodes and links to the hierarchy within a unified framework. Additionally, we propose a link filtering method, the similarity filter, able to extract hierarchical backbones containing the links that represent statistically significant deviations with respect to the maximum entropy null model for geometric heterogeneous networks. We applied our geometric approach to the detection of similarity backbones of real networks in different domains and found that the backbones preserve local topological features at all scales. Interestingly, we also found that similarity backbones favor cooperation in evolutionary dynamics modeling social dilemmas

Relating the philosophy and practice of ecological economics: The role of concepts, models, and case studies in inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research

We develop a comprehensive multi-level approach to ecological economics (CML-approach) which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of inter- and transdisciplinary research, and discuss the epistemological position on which this approach is based. In accordance with this understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and the underlying epistemological position, we develop an operationalization which comprises simultaneous analysis on three levels of abstraction: concepts, models and case studies. We explain these levels in detail, and, in particular, deduce our way of generic modeling in this context. Finally, we illustrate the CML-approach and demonstrate its fruitfulness by the example of the sustainable management of semi-arid rangelands. --ecological economics,interdisciplinarity,philosophy of science,transdisciplinarity