Production networks and failure avalanches

Although standard economics textbooks are seldom interested in production networks, modern economies are more and more based upon suppliers/customers interactions. One can consider entire sectors of the economy as generalised supply chains. We will take this view in the present paper and study under which conditions local failures to produce or simply to deliver can result in avalanches of shortage and bankruptcies across the network. We will show that a large class of models exhibit scale free distributions of production and wealth among firms and that metastable regions of high production are highly localised

The Community Structure of the Global Corporate Network

We investigate the community structure of the global ownership network of transnational corporations. We find a pronounced organization in communities that cannot be explained by randomness. Despite the global character of this network, communities reflect first of all the geographical location of firms, while the industrial sector plays only a marginal role. We also analyze the network in which the nodes are the communities and the links are obtained by aggregating the links among firms belonging to pairs of communities. We analyze the network centrality of the top 50 communities and we provide the first quantitative assessment of the financial sector role in connecting the global economy

The Role of Noise in the Spatial Public Goods Game

In this work we aim to analyze the role of noise in the spatial Public Goods Game, one of the most famous games in Evolutionary Game Theory. The dynamics of this game is affected by a number of parameters and processes, namely the topology of interactions among the agents, the synergy factor, and the strategy revision phase. The latter is a process that allows agents to change their strategy. Notably, rational agents tend to imitate richer neighbors, in order to increase the probability to maximize their payoff. By implementing a stochastic revision process, it is possible to control the level of noise in the system, so that even irrational updates may occur. In particular, in this work we study the effect of noise on the macroscopic behavior of a finite structured population playing the Public Goods Game. We consider both the case of a homogeneous population, where the noise in the system is controlled by tuning a parameter representing the level of stochasticity in the strategy revision phase, and a heterogeneous population composed of a variable proportion of rational and irrational agents. In both cases numerical investigations show that the Public Goods Game has a very rich behavior which strongly depends on the amount of noise in the system and on the value of the synergy factor. To conclude, our study sheds a new light on the relations between the microscopic dynamics of the Public Goods Game and its macroscopic behavior, strengthening the link between the field of Evolutionary Game Theory and statistical physics.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure