Economics and Finance

The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic voter model is theoretically intriguing, it misses an important feature of real opinion dynamics: it does not distinguish between an agent's publicly expressed opinion and her inner conviction. A person may not feel comfortable declaring her conviction if her social circle appears to hold an opposing view [1].

It is important for policy makers and public to understand the real positions of various stakeholders in the policy making process. To this end, data from the EU Transparency Register and the Orbis database was already combined to construct a multiplex lobby network [1]. In this study we make a step further, and analyze actual responses of lobby organizations to public consultations [2].

Models of segregation [1] are known to exhibit many fascinating spatial phenomena, by combining such models with financial interactions [2] positions of equilibria are disturbed and phase-transitional parameter interactions can be discovered. Utilising high performance computation for parameter space exploration significantly enhances analytical capability, inviting more rigorous exploration via statistical methods than has been historically presented.

The economic and social importance of the real estate market corresponds to overall economic development, but the housing sector can also be the cause of vulnerability and crisis. Therefore, the problem of estimating the value of real estate is always current and complex due to the influence of a large number of variables (macroeconomic, construction, etc.). Contrary to conventional real estate estimation methods, new approaches have been developed to evaluate prices in real estate markets.

The difficulty in supervising and controlling common-pool resources emphasizes the need for their sustainable exploitation. Nonetheless, sustainability is often disregarded in favor of overexploitation. To uncover human behavioral patterns when tasked with managing a common-pool resource, we designed and performed a social dilemma experiment combining theoretical and empirical methods. Specifically, we set up a forest dynamics model driven by inputs from volunteers playing a variant of a Public Goods Game.

Reliable estimates of indirect economic losses arising from natural disasters are currently out of scientific reach. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that combines a probabilistic physical damage catastrophe model with a new generation of macroeconomic agent-based models (ABMs). The ABM moves beyond the state of the art by exploiting large data sets from detailed national accounts, census data, and business information, etc., to simulate interactions of millions of agents representing each natural person or legal entity in a national economy.

The increasing impact of flooding at the global scale urges the need for developing more effective flood management strategies to guarantee a sustainable urban development and planning. Lessons learned from past and recent catastrophes underline the importance of avoiding local point-scale planning exclusively, but characterizing large scale basic-wide approaches for systemic flood risk management.

In the animal world, the competition between individuals belonging to different species for a resource often requires the cooperation of several individuals in groups. Evolutionary Game Theory provides a theoretical framework to model Darwinian competition that has been widely used to study evolving populations of lifeforms in biology and, particularly, for the study of cooperative behavior in animals.

Economic Fitness (EF) is a novel iteration of Complexity Science applied to Economics which evolves this approach into a systematic and mathematically sound and testable framework [1].  

We present a model to assess the resilience of financial networks under contagion due to overlapping portfolios. Our model consists of a free parameter \gamma which allows to generate different behavior of banks in term of the amount of asset being sold during fire sales. We apply the model to the US Commercial Banks Balance Sheet Data for the year 2007 and compare the model prediction of defaulted banks with the actual defaulted banks list for the year 2008 - 2011 from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.