|
Descripción
|
|
|---|---|
| Adam Smith is the father of modern economics. His work on the wealth of nations is the corner stone of the economic theory, which remains a valid reference nowadays. Smith was also one of the earliest thinkers to introduce the concept of complex emerging phenomena when stating that persons or firms can help society as a whole by pursuing their own interest. Based on this apparent contradiction, our objective is to study the topology and dynamics of international trade markets using the theory of complex networks from a weighted and bipartite perspective. Our data contains records of non-aggregated activity of international trade for 5000 products, 1000 categories and 100 industries over 15 years of history, from 1995 to 2009. We perform our analysis of markets based on the premise that markets are an economic analogy of mutualistic ecosystems, where a win-win situation is equally valid for mutualistic species (for instance, plants and pollinators) as it is for exporters and importers. Based on this analogy and the bipartite approach, we apply a similar set of the topological indicators to trade networks than those commonly used to study mutualistic networks. Based on the findings and statistical patterns of these topological measures, which highly resemble those of mutualistic networks, we also study the nested structure and the nestedness performance of trade networks across different level of aggregation of the data and for multiple periods. Following this topological but static study, we perform a thorough analysis of targeted dynamical phenomena, a newly developed methodology that takes advantage of the historical trade data, which leads to the discovery of mechanisms and patterns that explain the persistence over time of nestedness in trade networks. With this, we collect the findings of market topology and dynamics and formulate several statistical models to describe the process of market formation through a network growth process. We test several models but finally focus in a mutualistic model of markets, which is a link aggregation process that combines a preferential attachment mechanism and the weighted bipartite approach. The model is capable of simultaneously reproducing all the common features of the empirical data while providing further insights on how highly biased local decisions, which are consistent with self-interest, can lead to the well being of the system as a whole, providing an alternative explanation to the claims of Adam Smith. | |
|
Internacional
|
No |
|
ISBN
|
|
|
Tipo de Tesis
|
Doctoral |
|
Calificación
|
Sobresaliente |
|
Fecha
|
27/07/2017 |