Complexity

Emergent Orders Are All Around Us, Especially in Cities

Lynne Kiesling Ron Bailey’s Hit & Run post, Ant Hills=Brains=Cities, reminded me of some really important, fundamental ideas that tend to get lost as we natter about financial regulation, health care regulation, climate regulation … Emergent orders abound, and occur at all sorts of different scales — molecular, cellular, all the way to complex social …

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A New Paper, and Presenting It at Conferences This Week

Lynne Kiesling My co-author David Chassin and I have a new working paper available at SSRN from the GridWise Olympic Peninsula testbed demonstration project: Beneficial Complexity: A Field Experiment in Technology, Institutions, and Institutional Change in the Electric Power Industry This paper presents and analyzes the results of a recent field experiment in which residential …

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Peer-to-peer Power Through Microgrids

Lynne Kiesling When we think of concepts like peer-to-peer networks and disintermediation, we usually think of industries that are very Internet-centric. But these concepts can, should, and will apply in electric power networks too: smart grid technology enables peer-to-peer power. The study referenced in that BBC article analyzes the potential for microgrids, and argues that …

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Smart Grid, Complexity, and Swarm Logic

Lynne Kiesling One of the recurring themes here at KP is that smart grid technology makes it possible to harness distributed intelligence in the electric power network, and when you couple that network of distributed intelligence with a decentralized flow of information (such as price signals and market processes), you can get reliability through decentralized …

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Becoming a Pull Organization, or an Industry of Pull Organizations

Lynne Kiesling I really like this HBS blog post called The Case for Institutional Innovation from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davidson. In it they argue that future organizations are more likely to be “pull organizations”: Pull-based institutions are those that bring the force of attraction to bear on tens or even hundreds …

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What Model for the Financial System Breakdown? Falling Dominoes? Cascading Outages?

Michael Giberson Simon Johnson reviews and provides a summary of a paper by Daron Acemoglu on the current financial crisis.  Johnson summarizes one of Acemoglu’s points as follows: The seeds of the crisis were sown in the Great Moderation (the low inflation, relatively stable last 20 years or so).  Everyone who patted themselves or others …

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Bookstaber on the Perils of Financial Innovation

Michael Giberson Thoughtful, useful, inadequate and wrong-headed. That’s my reaction upon completing Richard Bookstaber’s book, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation. As I mentioned last week (in The Perils of Financial Innovation, or Not), Bookstaber was among the MIT-trained economists lured from academia to Wall Street …

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