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 $p_{\rm Hip}$ 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 $k$-regular trees in the limit of few hipsters. Additionally, our simulations demonstrate that a time delay $\tau$ 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.

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 $\hat\sigma_x$ 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

Some local--global phenomena in locally finite graphs

In this paper we present some results for a connected infinite graph $G$ with finite degrees where the properties of balls of small radii guarantee the existence of some Hamiltonian and connectivity properties of $G$. (For a vertex $w$ of a graph $G$ the ball of radius $r$ centered at $w$ is the subgraph of $G$ induced by the set $M_r(w)$ of vertices whose distance from $w$ does not exceed $r$). In particular, we prove that if every ball of radius 2 in $G$ is 2-connected and $G$ satisfies the condition $d_G(u)+d_G(v)\geq |M_2(w)|-1$ for each path $uwv$ in $G$, where $u$ and $v$ are non-adjacent vertices, then $G$ has a Hamiltonian curve, introduced by K\"undgen, Li and Thomassen (2017). Furthermore, we prove that if every ball of radius 1 in $G$ satisfies Ore's condition (1960) then all balls of any radius in $G$ are Hamiltonian.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; journal accepted versio

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