Complex systems: Ecology for bankers

@article{May2008ComplexSE,
  title={Complex systems: Ecology for bankers},
  author={Robert M. May and Simon A. Levin and George Sugihara},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2008},
  volume={451},
  pages={893-895}
}
There is common ground in analysing financial systems and ecosystems, especially in the need to identify conditions that dispose a system to be knocked from seeming stability into another, less happy state. 
View on Nature
nature.com
584 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
11
Background Citations
162
Methods Citations
14
Results Citations
3

584 Citations

Self-Organization, Resilience and Robustness of Complex Systems Through an Application to Financial Market from an Agent-Based Approach

This paper introduces the implementation of a computational agent-based financial market model in which the system is described on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. This artificial financial...

The next generation of action ecology: novel approaches towards global ecological research

This paper was commissioned by the members of the Ecosphere Editorial Board to commemorate the ESA Centennial celebration.

Networks and webs in ecosystems and financial systems

  • R. May
  • Economics
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
  • 2013
The paper sketches recent interest in the potential relevance of this work to ‘systemic risk’ and regulatory measures in banking systems, emphasizing the similarities and differences of the relationships between network structure of ecological networks and their consequent dynamical properties.

The Impact of Multiple Drivers on Marine Systems : Novel approaches for studying structural changes

Human action is transforming the species composition, biogeochemistry and habitats of the world’s oceans at unprecedented rates. The cumulative effect of natural and anthropogenic drivers is challe…

Systemic risk in banking ecosystems

Drawing analogies with the dynamics of ecological food webs and with networks within which infectious diseases spread, the interplay between complexity and stability in deliberately simplified models of financial networks is explored.

What climate negotiators can learn from slime moulds

Ecologist Simon Levin discusses his work linking social and natural systems.

Disease Ecology, Biodiversity, and the Latitudinal Gradient in Income

Vector-borne and parasitic diseases are drivers of the latitudinal gradient in income, and the burden of these diseases is predicted to rise as biodiversity falls.

Managing the climate commons at the nexus of ecology, behaviour and economics

Sustainably managing coupled ecological–economic systems requires not only an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles…

The Crisis of Civilization as an Analytical Framework

The idea of a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common…

Ecological analysis of world trade

...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 17 REFERENCES

Will a Large Complex System be Stable?

  • R. May
  • Computer Science
    Nature
  • 1972
It is suggested that large complex systems which are assembled (connected) at random may be expected to be stable up to a certain critical level of connectance, and then, as this increases, to suddenly become unstable.

New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report -- New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk -- that presents key findings from a cross-disciplinary conference that it cosponsored in May…

New directions for understanding systemic risk: a report on a conference cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Sciences

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report -- New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk -- that presents key findings from a cross-disciplinary conference that it cosponsored in May…

The topology of interbank payment flows

Anatomical and ecological constraints on Phanerozoic animal diversity in the marine realm

We grouped the fossil records of marine animal genera into suites defined by function and physiology. The stratigraphic coherence of the resulting diversity history indicates the importance of…

Error and attack tolerance of complex networks

It is found that scale-free networks, which include the World-Wide Web, the Internet, social networks and cells, display an unexpected degree of robustness, the ability of their nodes to communicate being unaffected even by unrealistically high failure rates.

Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control

This book discusses the biology of host-microparasite associations, dynamics of acquired immunity heterogeneity within the human community indirectly transmitted helminths, and the ecology and genetics of hosts and parasites.

Evidence of universality for the May-Wigner stability theorem for random networks with local dynamics.

  • S. SinhaS. Sinha
  • Mathematics
    Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics
  • 2005
Scaling results show that the probability of survival in the steady state agrees remarkably well with the May-Wigner stability criterion derived from linear stability arguments, suggesting universality of the complexity-stability relation for random networks with respect to arbitrary global dynamics of the system.

Infectious diseases of humans: Dynamics and control

Asymmetric Coevolutionary Networks Facilitate Biodiversity Maintenance

By using a simple dynamical model, it is shown that asymmetries inherent in coevolutionary networks may enhance long-term coexistence and facilitate biodiversity maintenance.