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Adapting to Disruptions: Flexibility as a Pillar of Supply Chain Resilience
(2023)arXivSupply chain disruptions cause shortages of raw material and products. To increase resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with shocks, substituting goods in established supply chains can become an effective alternative to creating new distribution links. We demonstrate its impact on supply deficits through a detailed analysis of the US opioid distribution system. Reconstructing 40 billion empirical distribution paths, our data-driven model ...Working Paper -
Modeling the Impact of Environmental Consciousness on the Supply-Demand Relationship between Firms and Customers
(2023)SSRNAn increasing environmental consciousness of customers can become a strong incentive for firms to supply environmental-friendly products. If these products are not available, supply-demand deficits emerge. We use an agent-based model with an underlying network topology to study different scenarios for mitigating these deficits. Both customers and firms can adjust their tolerance level for environmental pollution, but customers can also ...Working Paper -
Detecting and Optimising Team Interactions in Software Development
(2023)arXivThe functional interaction structure of a team captures the preferences with which members of different roles interact. This paper presents a data-driven approach to detect the functional interaction structure for software development teams from traces team members leave on development platforms during their daily work. Our approach considers differences in the activity levels of team members and uses a block-constrained configuration ...Working Paper -
Struggling with change: The fragile resilience of collectives
(2022)arXivCollectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined. We propose a novel resilience measure combining two dimensions: robustness and adaptivity. We demonstrate how they can be quantified using data from a software developer collective. ...Working Paper -
Reconstructing signed relations from interaction data
(2022)arXivPositive and negative relations play an essential role in human behavior and shape the communities we live in. Despite their importance, data about signed relations is rare and commonly gathered through surveys. Interaction data is more abundant, for instance, in the form of proximity or communication data. So far, though, it could not be utilized to detect signed relations. In this paper, we show how the underlying signed relations can ...Working Paper -
Disentangling Active and Passive Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress
(2022)arXivIn the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills. We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the bill's content. To this end, we develop an Encoder+RGCN based model that learns legislator representations from bill texts and speech transcripts. These representations predict active and passive ...Working Paper -
Network embeddedness indicates the innovation potential of firms
(2022)arXivFirms' innovation potential depends on their position in the R&D network. But details on this relation remain unclear because measures to quantify network embeddedness have been controversially discussed. We propose and validate a new measure, coreness, obtained from the weighted k-core decomposition of the R&D network. Using data on R&D alliances, we analyse the change of coreness for 14,000 firms over 25 years and patenting activity. A ...Working Paper -
The downside of heterogeneity: How established relations counteract systemic adaptivity in tasks assignments
(2021)arXivWe study the lock-in effect in a network of task assignments. Agents have a heterogeneous fitness for solving tasks and can redistribute unfinished tasks to other agents. They learn over time to whom to reassign tasks and preferably choose agents with higher fitness. A lock-in occurs if reassignments can no longer adapt. Agents overwhelmed with tasks then fail, leading to failure cascades. We find that the probability for lock-ins and ...Working Paper -
Social nucleation: Group formation as a phase transition
(2021)arXivThe spontaneous formation and subsequent growth, dissolution, merger and competition of social groups bears similarities to physical phase transitions in metastable finite systems. We examine three different scenarios, percolation, spinodal decomposition and nucleation, to describe the formation of social groups of varying size and density. In our agent-based model, we use a feedback between the opinions of agents and their ability to ...Working Paper -
Reproducing scientists' mobility: A data-driven model
(2020)arXivHigh skill labour is an important factor underpinning the competitive advantage of modern economies. Therefore, attracting and retaining scientists has become a major concern for migration policy. In this work, we study the migration of scientists on a global scale, by combining two large data sets covering the publications of 3.5 Mio scientists over 60 years. We analyse their geographical distances moved for a new affiliation and their ...Working Paper