We study the role of hierarchical structures in a simple model of collective consensus formation based on the bounded confidence model with continuous individual opinions. For the particular variation of this model considered in this paper, we assume that a bias toward an extreme opinion is...

The excessive increase of leverage, i.e. the abuse of debt financing, is considered one of the primary factors in the default of financial institutions since it amplifies potential investment losses. On the other side, portfolio diversification acts to mitigate these losses. Systemic risk...

We study a system in which N agents have to decide between two strategies θi(i ∈ 1 … N), for defection or cooperation, when interacting with other n agents (either spatial neighbors or randomly chosen ones). After each round, they update their strategy responding nonlinearly to two...