Early State Formation in the Titicaca BasinThe Lake Titicaca Basin in highland Peru and Bolivia ranks as one of the great centers of early state development in the world. This paper outlines the complex processes of early state formation in this region during the time period from approximately 500 B.C. to A.D. 400. During this Upper Formative Period, there were dozens of complex non-state level societies throughout the Titicaca region. Over time, one of these societies known as Tiwanaku, successfully competed with other polities in the region for economic, political and ideological power. By A.D. 400, Tiwanaku had become the first fully integrated state system in the region powerful enough to expand well beyond its core territory in subsequent centuries. The key process involved in early state development in the Titicaca Basin centers on the control of domestic labor by emergent elites during the Upper Formative Period. This paper defines the nature of these elite strategies including the intensification of agricultural systems, the expansion of interregional trade, the creation of elite ideologies and successful competition with other elites. / La cuenca del lago Titicaca en la sierra del Perú y de Bolivia está considerada como uno de los grandes centros del desarrollo estatal temprano en el mundo. Este trabajo esboza los procesos complejos de la formación del estado temprano en esta región durante el periodo entre 500 a.C y 400 d.C. Durante este periodo del Formativo Superior existían docenas de sociedades complejas en toda la región de Titicaca, todas de un nivel no estatal. Con el curso del tiempo, una de estas sociedades, conocida como Tiwanaku, compitió exitosamente con las demás formaciones políticas de la región en busca del poder económico, político e ideológico. Alrededor de 400 d.C., Tiwanaku se convirtió en el primer sistema estatal plenamente integrado de la región con suficiente poder para expandirse mucho más allá del núcleo territorial en los siglos siguientes. El proceso clave dentro del desarrollo estatal temprano de la cuenca del Titicaca se centra en el control de la labor doméstica por elites que aparecieron durante el Periodo Formativo Superior. En este trabajo se define la naturaleza de las estrategias de estas elites, las que incluyen la intensificación de los sistemas agrícolas, la expansión del comercio interregional, la creación de ideologías de elite y la competencia exitosa con otras elites.

Scale invariance, collective behaviours and structural reorganization are crucial for portfolio management (portfolio composition, hedging, alternative definition of risk, etc.). This lack of any characteristic scale and such elaborated behaviours find their origin in the theory of complex systems. There are several mechanisms which generate scale invariance but maximum entropy models are able to explain both scale invariance and collective behaviours.<p>The study of the structure and collective modes of financial markets attracts more and more attention. It has been shown that some agent based models are able to reproduce some stylized facts. Despite their partial success, there is still the problem of rules design. In this work, we used a statistical inverse approach to model the structure and co-movements in financial markets. Inverse models restrict the number of assumptions. We found that a pairwise maximum entropy model is consistent with the data and is able to describe the complex structure of financial systems. We considered the existence of a critical state which is linked to how the market processes information, how it responds to exogenous inputs and how its structure changes. The considered data sets did not reveal a persistent critical state but rather oscillations between order and disorder.<p>In this framework, we also showed that the collective modes are mostly dominated by pairwise co-movements and that univariate models are not good candidates to model crashes. The analysis also suggests a genuine adaptive process since both the maximum variance of the log-likelihood and the accuracy of the predictive scheme vary through time. This approach may provide some clue to crash precursors and may provide highlights on how a shock spreads in a financial network and if it will lead to a crash. The natural continuation of the present work could be the study of such a mechanism. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Transdisciplinary focused work concentrates on the possibilities of the application of the system thinking in the various science branches. Out of system disciplines it studies in detail the system dynamics -- specifically Archetypes (general structures). Introduction to the general system theory can be found in the first section of the theoretical part. Next sections are more particular and refer to the main ideas of system dynamics and Archetypes. Next part of the work focuses on common methods of the economic analysis. Apart from their brief description there is also discussion about their main theoretical flaws. The economic analysis of the specific socio-economic issue (road speed limits) is performed in the last part of the work and it includes substantial usage of the Archetypes and general system-thinking attitude. Primary aim of this part is to confirm or disprove the hypothesis of the utility of Archetypes in the economic analysis.

Es heißt, moderne Marktwirtschaften seien sich selbst regulierende Systeme. Dies gelte auch für die Moral der Akteure. Die Finanzkrisen der letzten Jahre haben die Frage nach der Stärke der Selbstheilungskräfte aufgeworfen. Dies wird im Aufsatz untersucht. Dazu werden zunächst die geisteswissenschaftlichen Konzeptionen des Liberalismus, des Ordoliberalismus und der Zentralverwaltungswirtschaft vorgestellt. Dann wird eine evolutionswissenschaftliche Konzeption dagegengestellt. Es zeigt sich, dass die geisteswissenschaftlichen Konzeptionen das „eigentliche“ Zielsystem der Akteure nur unvollkommen berücksichtigen. Sie über- oder unterschätzen daher das Vermögen der Systeme zur Selbstheilung. Die größte Übereinstimmung finden wir beim Ordoliberalismus, der mit seiner Skepsis in die Selbstheilungskräfte freier Märkte Recht hat: Es muss einen institutionellen Ordnungsrahmen geben, der mit der wünschenswerten gesellschaftlichen Moral besser als bisher zu verknüpfen ist. Für die weitere Forschung sehen wir die wichtige Aufgabe, die Selbstheilungskräfte der Gesellschaft in Bezug auf moralisches Verhalten genauer zu erforschen. / It has been said, modern market economies are self-regulating systems. This would also be true for the moral standards of its actors. The financial crises of recent years have put the strength of self-healing capacities in question. This will be investigated in the following paper. In order to do so, concepts of social sciences such as liberalism, ordoliberalism and central command economy will be presented. Subsequently, evolution theory will oppose these concepts. The analysis shows that social sciences only imperfectly recognize the essential objectives of actors. They over- or underestimate the self-healing capabilities of the economy systems. The largest conformity was found in the ordoliberalism, whose skeptics in self-healing capacities of free markets have been upheld. An institutional framework has to be put in place, which is more strongly linked to the morals of civil society as has been the case so far. In the future, one important task for research will be to further investigate self-healing capacities of societies in light of moral behavior.

Thesis (DPhil (Logistics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / South Africa currently experiences the double jeopardy problem of catching up to global economic competitiveness whilst at the same time feeling the pressures of sustainability management spearheaded by a global agenda. Global sustainability is defined as growth that is shared without depleting natural resources or damaging the environment. Academic disciplines are challenged to make a contribution and economics as such should contribute by providing the lead and lag indicators for the planning and measurement of scarce resources usuage. This integrative view includes economic sub-disciplines, such as logistics. This integrative view is an acknowledged part of the economics discipline, except that the macro-economic context of some sub-disciplines, such as logistics, often receives less attention during the course of academic activities. The distribution of resources and outputs in the economy is a logistics controlled cross-cutting factor, but suffers from a lack of macro-economic perspective, and lead and lag orientated measurement. This state of the affairs is a historic backlog of logistics and its specific position within economics. During the primary economic era the world began to configure networks and markets, which became more pronounced and settled with the dawn and settling of the industrial era. Logistics then was a “given” and did not receive much thought even as industrial, market economies developed. Transport was regarded as an administered cost, i.e. inefficiencies in logistics systems were evenly distributed between competitors, not giving any specific entity an advantage. With the advent of global competition and the diminishing returns on other cost saving measures, companies began to collaborate and integrate logistics functions within value chains, but the administered part of transport costs failed to receive the attention it required. In this way, global competitors did begin to experience disadvantages on a national level as whole economies suffered from inefficiencies in logistics and specifically transport systems.

The intent of the thesis is to ascertain whether mitigation of political risk to the IT industry in Panama can be of value to the country by improving the economy and standard of living.

Artificiell intelligens (AI) är ett omtalat fenomen i media där tidigare studier främst fokuserat på teknologins möjligheter. Tidigare studier är huvudsakligen gjorda om tekniken och inte hur människor uppfattar den, trots att tidigare forskning också visar att de mänskliga perspektiven kan vara väsentliga för lyckade implementationer. Även företag inom branschen för ekonomisystem ser potentialen med tekniken men känner osäkerhet kring hur det uppfattas av de anställda. Studiens syfte är att undersöka anställdas åsikter om artificiell intelligens i ekonomisystem. Detta för att belysa vad det finns för åsikter som kan påverka framtida potentiella AI-implementationer. Syftet besvaras genom två forskningsfrågor där individernas åsikter utgör grunden för studien. En enkätintervju med huvudsakligen öppna frågor används för att samla in empiriska data. Denna bygger på elva öppna och sju stängda frågor, utifrån tidigare forskning och det valda ramverket, varav elva individer inom ekonomisystems-branschen besvarade studien. Dessa individer arbetar främst i segment utifrån programmering eller produktutveckling. Det empiriska materialet analyseras och struktureras upp enligt Jacobsen och Creswell och Creswells metoder för tematisering av kvalitativa data. Likaså placeras de olika teman in i de fyra kategorierna som tagits fram från ramverket Technology readiness index, vilket möjliggör vidare analys av den studerade gruppen och deras åsikter om tekniken. När analys och resultat framställs dras paralleller och egna diskussioner fram vilka leder till studiens slutsatser. Dessa visar att AI anses ha potential, både av respondenterna och tidigare forskning. Det finns däremot vissa oroligheter gällande förtroende och transparens till tekniken, vilket ses som motståndsfaktorer enligt ramverket. Likaså anses det att ytterligare utbildning behövs för att få ut full potential av AI. Studiens resultat visar däremot ett behov av tekniken för att bibehålla konkurrenskraft. Överlag finns det positivism och drivkrafter för att implementera AI i ekonomisystem, samtidigt lyfts orosmoment och problem som gör de anställda återhållsamma till AI-implementation i sitt nuvarande skick. Dessa åsikter kan agera både stärkande och hämmande faktorer för potentiella framtida AI-implementeringar i ekonomisystem. / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a popular phenomenon in the media, where previous studies have mainly focused on the possibilities of the technology. Previous studies have primarily been conducted on the technology itself and not how people perceive it, despite previous research indicating that human perspectives can be essential for successful implementations. Even companies in the industry of economic systems recognize the potential of the technology but express uncertainty how it is perceived by the employees. The purpose of this study is to investigate employees' opinions about artificial intelligence in economic systems. This is done to contribute with more knowledge about opinions that could affect potential future AI implementations. The purpose is addressed through two research questions, where individuals’ opinions form the foundation of the study. A survey-interview with mainly open-ended questions is used to collect empirical data. It consists of eleven open-ended and seven closed-ended questions, based on previous research and the chosen framework. Eleven individuals working in the industry of economic systems responded to the study. These individuals primarily work in areas related to programming or product development. The empirical material is analyzed and structured according to Jacobsen and Creswell and Creswell's methods for thematic analysis of qualitative data. Likewise, the different themes are categorized into the four categories developed from the Technology readiness index framework, enabling further analysis of the studied group and their opinions about the technology. When the analysis and results are presented, parallels and reflections are made, leading to the study's conclusions. These show that AI is considered to have potential, both by the respondents and previous research. However, there are some concerns with trust and transparency in the technology, which are seen as inhibiting factors according to the framework. It is also considered that further education is required to fully realize the potential of AI. However, the findings of the study recognize the need for the technology to maintain competitiveness. Overall, there is positivity and drive to implement AI in economic systems, but concerns and problems are raised, making employees hesitant towards development in its current state. These opinions can act as both driving factors and inhibiting factors against potential future implementations in economic systems.