16,862 research outputs found
Hipsters on Networks: How a Small Group of Individuals Can Lead to an Anti-Establishment Majority
The spread of opinions, memes, diseases, and "alternative facts" in a
population depends both on the details of the spreading process and on the
structure of the social and communication networks on which they spread. In
this paper, we explore how \textit{anti-establishment} nodes (e.g.,
\textit{hipsters}) influence the spreading dynamics of two competing products.
We consider a model in which spreading follows a deterministic rule for
updating node states (which describe which product has been adopted) in which
an adjustable fraction of the nodes in a network are hipsters,
who choose to adopt the product that they believe is the less popular of the
two. The remaining nodes are conformists, who choose which product to adopt by
considering which products their immediate neighbors have adopted. We simulate
our model on both synthetic and real networks, and we show that the hipsters
have a major effect on the final fraction of people who adopt each product:
even when only one of the two products exists at the beginning of the
simulations, a very small fraction of hipsters in a network can still cause the
other product to eventually become the more popular one. To account for this
behavior, we construct an approximation for the steady-state adoption fraction
on -regular trees in the limit of few hipsters. Additionally, our
simulations demonstrate that a time delay in the knowledge of the
product distribution in a population, as compared to immediate knowledge of
product adoption among nearest neighbors, can have a large effect on the final
distribution of product adoptions. Our simple model and analysis may help shed
light on the road to success for anti-establishment choices in elections, as
such success can arise rather generically in our model from a small number of
anti-establishment individuals and ordinary processes of social influence on
normal individuals.Comment: Extensively revised, with much new analysis and numerics The abstract
on arXiv is a shortened version of the full abstract because of space limit
Inflation Targeting in Transition Countries: Experience and Prospects
This paper examines the inflation targeting experience in three transition countries: the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. While the examined countries have missed inflation targets often by a large margin, they nevertheless progressed well with disinflation. A key lesson from the experience of the inflation targeting transition countries is that economic performance will improve and support for the central bank will be higher if the central banks emphasize avoiding undershoots of the inflation target as much as avoiding overshoots. Also economic performance will be enhanced if inflation targeting central banks in transition countries do not engage in active manipulation of the exchange rate. The relationship between the central bank and the government in these countries has been quite difficult, but this can be alleviated by having a direct government involvement in the setting of the inflation target and with a more active role of the central bank in communicating with both the government and the public. In addition having technocrats appointed as the head of the central bank rather than politicians may help in depersonalizing the conduct of monetary policy and increase support for the independence of the central bank. The paper also addresses the future perspective of monetary policy in the transition economies and concludes that even after the EU accession, inflation targeting can remain the main pillar of monetary strategy in the three examined accession countries during the time before they will join the EMU.
Some local--global phenomena in locally finite graphs
In this paper we present some results for a connected infinite graph with
finite degrees where the properties of balls of small radii guarantee the
existence of some Hamiltonian and connectivity properties of . (For a vertex
of a graph the ball of radius centered at is the subgraph of
induced by the set of vertices whose distance from does not
exceed ). In particular, we prove that if every ball of radius 2 in is
2-connected and satisfies the condition for
each path in , where and are non-adjacent vertices, then
has a Hamiltonian curve, introduced by K\"undgen, Li and Thomassen (2017).
Furthermore, we prove that if every ball of radius 1 in satisfies Ore's
condition (1960) then all balls of any radius in are Hamiltonian.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; journal accepted versio
Tomography of a displacement photon counter for discrimination of single-rail optical qubits
We investigate the performance of a Kennedy receiver, which is known as a
beneficial tool in optical coherent communications, to the quantum state
discrimination of the two superpositions of vacuum and single photon states
corresponding to the eigenstates in the single-rail encoding of
photonic qubits. We experimentally characterize the Kennedy receiver in
vacuum-single photon two-dimensional space using quantum detector tomography
and evaluate the achievable discrimination error probability from the
reconstructed measurement operators. We furthermore derive the minimum error
rate obtainable with Gaussian transformations and homodyne detection. Our proof
of principle experiment shows that the Kennedy receiver can achieve a
discrimination error surpassing homodyne detection
Assessments of macroscopicity for quantum optical states
With the slow but constant progress in the coherent control of quantum
systems, it is now possible to create large quantum superpositions. There has
therefore been an increased interest in quantifying any claims of
macroscopicity. We attempt here to motivate three criteria which we believe
should enter in the assessment of macroscopic quantumness: The number of
quantum fluctuation photons, the purity of the states, and the ease with which
the branches making up the state can be distinguished
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