84 research outputs found
Inequality, a scourge of the XXI century
Social and economic inequality is a plague of the XXI Century. It is
continuously widening, as the wealth of a relatively small group increases and,
therefore, the rest of the world shares a shrinking fraction of resources. This
situation has been predicted and denounced by economists and econophysicists.
The latter ones have widely used models of market dynamics which consider that
wealth distribution is the result of wealth exchanges among economic agents. A
simple analogy relates the wealth in a society with the kinetic energy of the
molecules in a gas, and the trade between agents to the energy exchange between
the molecules during collisions. However, while in physical systems, thanks to
the equipartition of energy, the gas eventually arrives at an equilibrium
state, in many exchange models the economic system never equilibrates. Instead,
it moves toward a "condensed" state, where one or a few agents concentrate all
the wealth of the society and the rest of agents shares zero or a very small
fraction of the total wealth. Here we discuss two ways of avoiding the
"condensed" state. On one hand, we consider a regulatory policy that favors the
poorest agent in the exchanges, thus increasing the probability that the wealth
goes from the richest to the poorest agent. On the other hand, we study a tax
system and its effects on wealth distribution. We compare the redistribution
processes and conclude that complete control of the inequalities can be
attained with simple regulations or interventions
Behavioral analyses of retailers’ ordering decisions
The main objective I pursue in this thesis is to better understand how different factors may independently and in combination influence retailers' ordering decisions under different supply chain structures (single agent and multi agent), different demand uncertainty (deterministic and stochastic), and different interaction among retailers (no interaction, competition and cooperation). I developed three different studies where I build on different formal management model and then run multiple behavioral studies to better understand subjects’ behavior. The first study analyzes order amplification in a single-supplier single-retailer supply chain. I used a behavioral experiment to test retailers’ orders under different ordering delays and different times to build supplier’s capacity. Results provide (i) a better understanding of the endogenous dynamics leading to retailers’ ordering amplification, and (ii) a description of subjects’ biases and deviation from optimal trajectories; despite subjects have full information about the system structure. The second study analyzes how order amplification can also take place when there is fierce retailer competition and limited supplier capacity. I study how different factors (different time to build supplier capacity, different levels of competition among retailers, different magnitudes of supply shortage and different allocation mechanisms) may independently and in combination influence retailers’ order in a system with two retailers under supply competition. Results show that (i) the bullwhip effect persists even when subjects do not have incentives to deviate, (ii) subjects amplify their orders in an attempt to build an unnecessary safety stock to respond to potential deviations from the other retailers, and (iii) retailers’ underperformance varies with the allocation mechanism used by the supplier. In the last study, I analyze retailers’ orders in a system where there is uncertainty in the final customer demand. I experimentally explore the effect of transshipments among retailers in a single-supplier multi-retailer supply chain. Specifically, I explore retailers’ orders under different profit and communication conditions. In addition, I integrate analytical and behavioral models to improve supply chain performance. Results show that (i) the persistence of common biases in a newsvendor problem (pull-to-center, demand chasing, loss aversion, psychological disutility), (ii) communication could improve coordination and may reduce demand chasing behavior, (iii) supply chain performance increases with the use of behavioral strategies embedded within a traditional optimization model, and (iv) dynamic heuristics improve overall coordination, outperforming a simple Nash Equilibrium strategy
Complex networks vulnerability to module-based attacks
In the multidisciplinary field of Network Science, optimization of procedures
for efficiently breaking complex networks is attracting much attention from
practical points of view. In this contribution we present a module-based method
to efficiently break complex networks. The procedure first identifies the
communities in which the network can be represented, then it deletes the nodes
(edges) that connect different modules by its order in the betweenness
centrality ranking list. We illustrate the method by applying it to various
well known examples of social, infrastructure, and biological networks. We show
that the proposed method always outperforms vertex (edge) attacks which are
based on the ranking of node (edge) degree or centrality, with a huge gain in
efficiency for some examples. Remarkably, for the US power grid, the present
method breaks the original network of 4941 nodes to many fragments smaller than
197 nodes (4% of the original size) by removing mere 164 nodes (~3%) identified
by the procedure. By comparison, any degree or centrality based procedure,
deleting the same amount of nodes, removes only 22% of the original network,
i.e. more than 3800 nodes continue to be connected after thatComment: 8 pages, 8 figure
Promiscuity and the Evolution of Sexual Transmitted Diseases
We study the relation between different social behaviors and the onset of
epidemics in a model for the dynamics of sexual transmitted diseases. The model
considers the society as a system of individual sexuated agents that can be
organized in couples and interact with each other. The different social
behaviors are incorporated assigning what we call a promiscuity value to each
individual agent. The individual promiscuity is taken from a distributions and
represents the daily probability of going out to look for a sexual partner,
abandoning its eventual mate. In terms of this parameter we find a threshold
for the epidemic which is much lower than the classical fully mixed model
prediction, i.e. (basic reproductive number) . Different forms for
the distribution of the population promiscuity are considered showing that the
threshold is weakly sensitive to them. We study the homosexual and the
heterosexual case as well.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
The Social Behavior and the Evolution of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
We introduce a model for the evolution of sexually transmitted diseases, in
which the social behavior is incorporated as a determinant factor for the
further propagation of the infection. The system may be regarded as a society
of agents where in principle anyone can sexually interact with any other one in
the population. Different social behaviors are reflected in a distribution of
sexual attitudes ranging from the more conservative to the more promiscuous.
This is measured by what we call the promiscuity parameter. In terms of this
parameter, we find a critical behavior for the evolution of the disease. There
is a threshold below what the epidemic does not occur. We relate this critical
value of the promiscuity to what epidemiologist call the basic reproductive
number, connecting it with the other parameters of the model, namely the
infectivity and the infective period in a quantitative way. We consider the
possibility of subjects be grouped in couples. In this contribution only the
homosexual case is analyzed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
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