Self-organized evolution in socio-economic environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model for social and economic change that demonstrates systems self-organize to critical states with power-law event distributions and optimal performance.

Contribution

It presents a simple yet rich model capturing the dynamics of socio-economic evolution and shows self-organization to criticality and optimality in stationary states.

Findings

System reaches criticality with power-law distributions.

System self-organizes to optimal performance.

Model exhibits rich dynamic behavior.

Abstract

We propose a general scenario to analyze social and economic changes in modern environments. We illustrate the ideas with a model that incorporating the main trends is simple enough to extract analytical results and, at the same time, sufficiently complex to display a rich dynamic behavior. Our study shows that there exists a macroscopic observable that is maximized in a regime where the system is critical, in the sense that the distribution of events follow power-laws. Computer simulations show that, in addition, the system always self-organizes to achieve the optimal performance in the stationary state.