Complexity economics
Why treating an economy as a system in permanent motion rather than a machine that settles into equilibrium changes what you measure, model and forecast.
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Complexity · Networks · Social systems
Social systems do not sit still. Neither should the models.
Nessnet collects reference notes on the methods used to study societies as systems in motion: complexity economics, agent-based simulation, network analysis and the uses and limits of large behavioural datasets.
Four themes
Where the work sits
Each theme is a hub page with its own set of longer notes. Everything is cross-linked, so you can start anywhere.
Agent-based modelling
How agent-based models are built, what they are good for, where they fail, and which software people actually use.
Open theme →Social networks
Network structure, how information and opinions move through it, and what the measures actually mean.
Open theme →Data and society
What large behavioural datasets can and cannot tell you about a society, and what happens when policy is built on them.
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Latest notes
Recently written
Longer pieces, each one self-contained and linked into the wider set.
Software and Tools for Agent-Based Modelling
The frameworks people actually use, what each is good for, and when writing it yourself is the right answer.
Read →Validation and Calibration: The Hard Part
A model flexible enough to represent adaptive heterogeneous agents is flexible enough to fit anything. What separates a validated model from a fitted one.
Read →Digital Health and Access to Medicines
What happens to access, price and safety when pharmacy moves online - the European mail-order market as a worked case in digital service transitions.
Read →Inequality and Growth: What the Distribution Does
Inequality is a property of a distribution, which makes it invisible to models built around a representative agent. What changes when you model the distribution directly.
Read →Media, Polarisation and Misinformation
What the evidence supports about algorithmic curation, echo chambers and the spread of false information, and where popular accounts run ahead of it.
Read →Financial Instability as a Structural Property
Why financial systems generate their own crises, how network exposure turns a local failure into a systemic one, and what regulators took from the research.
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Applied reading
When a service moves online
One recurring theme here is what happens when an established, regulated service shifts to a digital channel: who gains access, what the price signals actually mean once delivery is included, and how trust gets reconstructed when the physical cues disappear. European mail-order pharmacy is the clearest worked example, because the product is standardised and the offline counterfactual runs in parallel.
Our note on digital health and access to medicines works through it. For readers who want the market data behind it, this German comparison of mail-order pharmacies sets out how shipping thresholds change the comparison, which is the part unit prices tend to hide.