An important challenge in several disciplines is to understand how sudden changes can propagate among coupled systems. Examples include the synchronization of business cycles, population collapse in patchy ecosystems, markets shifting to a new …
The seniority of debt, which determines the order in which a bankrupt institution repays its debts, is an important and sometimes contentious feature of financial crises, yet its impact on systemwide stability is not well understood. We capture …
We explore a model of the interaction between banks and outside investors in which the ability of banks to issue inside money (short-term liabilities believed to be convertible into currency at par) can generate a collapse in asset prices and …
The Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld (BTW) sandpile process is an archetypal, stylized model of complex systems with a critical point as an attractor of their dynamics. This phenomenon, called self-organized criticality, appears to occur ubiquitously in both …
Controlling self-organizing systems is challenging because the system responds to the controller. Here, we develop a model that captures the essential self-organizing mechanisms of Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld (BTW) sandpiles on networks, a self-organized …
When a tenth of humanity lost power over 2 days in India in July 2012, technical failure was not the only culprit. Like many recent blackouts, this outage resulted from couplings among systems, including extreme weather exacerbated by climate change, …
Understanding how interdependence among systems affects cascading behaviors is increasingly important across many fields of science and engineering. Inspired by cascades of load shedding in coupled electric grids and other infrastructure, we study …