The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is stressing the world population, health care system and economies at a level not experienced since WWII or the last “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. This shock provides a real-life test of the resilience of human societies, challenging our understanding and...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set -up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

A vast literature investigating behavioural underpinnings of financial bubbles and crashes relies on laboratory experiments. However, it is not yet clear how findings generated in a highly artificial environment relate to the human behaviour in the wild. It is of concern that the laboratory...

Exploiting the near-experimental conditions provided by the British Pound market in US Dollars during the Brexit vote of June 23rd, 2016, we unearth a major challenge to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. With a single factor of prior polling information, we show that the Brexit result could have...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set-up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

We present a generic new mechanism for the emergence of collective exuberance among interacting agents in a general class of Ising-like models that have a long history in social sciences and economics. The mechanism relies on the recognition that socioeconomic networks are intrinsically...

The Swiss energy plan 2050 includes an increase of electricity consumption by 37% from the electrification of transport and heating, together with phasing out 2.9 GWe of nuclear power (about one-third of the nation's gross electricity generation) and substituting this lost power mainly with...