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Introduction

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Decoding Complexity

Part of the book series: Springer Theses ((Springer Theses))

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Abstract

It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society. We have created systems, that have outgrown our capacity to genuinely understand and control them. In order to try and provide a contribution to the understanding of socio-economic systems, this thesis aims at answering the following questions

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, (Strogatz 2001; Albert and Barabási 2002; Dorogovtsev and Mendes 2002, 2003; Newman 2003; Newman et al. 2006; Caldarelli 2007).

  2. 2.

    A general reference is Vega-Redondo (2007).

  3. 3.

    See Appendix B.3 for an introduction of the notion.

  4. 4.

    A list of acronyms can be found in front matter of this book.

  5. 5.

    This notion will be introduced in Sect. 1.2.1.

  6. 6.

    This is discussed in Sect. 1.2.3.

  7. 7.

    See Sect. 1.2.1.

  8. 8.

    However, in anticipation of our findings presented in Chap. 3, and in contrast to such intuition, the empirical network analysis of Anglo-Saxon countries reveals an entirely different picture: although, from a local perspective, firms are indeed widely held, from a bird’s-eye point-of-view one can identify the existence of a small elite of shareholders continually reappears as the controlling entity of all the stocks, without ever having been previously detected or reported on.

  9. 9.

    See Appendix A.1.3.

  10. 10.

    Called FOC: http://www.focproject.net/.

  11. 11.

    See in detail (Farmer et al. 2012) or http://www.futurict.eu/ and http://www.fet11.eu/about/fet-flagships.

  12. 12.

    See http://www.unglobalpulse.org/.

  13. 13.

    For instance, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/big_data_press_release.pdf.

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Glattfelder, J.B. (2013). Introduction. In: Decoding Complexity. Springer Theses. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33424-5_1

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