Metadata only
Author
Burkholz, Rebekka
Garas, Antonios
Schweitzer, Frank
Date
2015Type
- Working Paper
Altmetrics
Abstract
We consider the problem of risk diversification in complex networks. Nodes represent e.g. financial actors, whereas weighted links represent e.g. financial obligations (credits/debts). Each node has a risk to fail because of losses resulting from defaulting neighbors, which may lead to large failure cascades. Classical risk diversification strategies usually neglect network effects and therefore suggest that risk can be reduced if possible losses (i.e., exposures) are split among many neighbors (exposure diversification, ED). But from a complex networks perspective diversification implies higher connectivity of the system as a whole which can also lead to increasing failure risk of a node. To cope with this, we propose a different strategy (damage diversification, DD), i.e. the diversification of losses that are imposed on neighboring nodes as opposed to losses incurred by the node itself. Here, we quantify the potential of DD to reduce systemic risk in comparison to ED. For this, we develop a branching process approximation that we generalize to weighted networks with (almost) arbitrary degree and weight distributions. This allows us to identify systemically relevant nodes in a network even if their directed weights differ strongly. On the macro level, we provide an analytical expression for the average cascade size, to quantify systemic risk. Furthermore, on the meso level we calculate failure probabilities of nodes conditional on their system relevance Show more
Publication status
publishedJournal / series
arXivPages
Publisher
Cornell UniversityOrganisational unit
03682 - Schweitzer, Frank
Notes
Submitted 3 March 2015. See also: http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:177998.More
Show all metadata
Altmetrics