ALBERT

Description: The Belt and Road initiative (BRI) was announced in 2013 by the Chinese government. Its goal is to promote the cooperation between European and Asian countries, as well as enhancing the trust between members and unifying the market. Since its creation, more and more developing countries are joining the initiative. Based on the geographical location characteristics of the countries in this initiative, we propose an improvement of a popular recommendation algorithm that includes geographic location information. This recommendation algorithm is able to make suitable recommendations of products for countries in the BRI. Then, Fitness and Complexity metrics are used to evaluate the impact of the recommendation results and measure the country’s competitiveness. The aim of this work is to provide countries’ insights on the ideal development direction. By following the recommendations, the countries can quickly increase their international competitiveness.

Description: In many industries, partners are interconnected in project alliances that have limited lifespans and clearly-defined boundaries. The transparency of the movie industry provides a unique opportunity to study how alliance network topologies impact the performance of project alliances from the perspectives of social networks and organization theories. In this work, we compiled a massive movie dataset and constructed alliance networks for both movie production and distribution companies. Using the box office as the proxy for the financial performance of a movie project alliance, this research investigates how the two alliance networks impact the box office. We introduce the social network properties of degrees, centralities, and structural holes as alliance network variables into empirical regression models. The results show that alliance networks have a significant influence on the box office. The degrees of production companies and the structural holes of distribution companies are especially important to achieve success in the box office. The results add new evidence for the study of the movie economy and alliance networks. Meanwhile, this work also provides implications for the movie industry by revealing that it is essential to wisely choose partners that are appropriately embedded in alliance networks for the success of a movie project.

Description: GDP is a classic indicator of the extent of national economic development. Research based on the World Trade Network has found that a country’s GDP depends largely on the products it exports. In order to increase the competitiveness of a country and further increase its GDP, a crucial issue is finding the right direction to upgrade the industry so that the country can enhance its competitiveness. The proximity indicator measures the similarity between products and can be used to predict the probability that a country will develop a new industry. On the other hand, the Fitness–Complexity algorithm can help to find the important products and developing countries. In this paper, we find that the maximum of the proximity between a certain product and a country’s existing products is highly correlated with the probability that the country exports this new product in the next year. In addition, we find that the more products that are related to a certain product, the higher probability of the emergence of the new product. Finally, we combine the proximity indicator and the Fitness–Complexity algorithm and then attempt to provide a recommendation list of new products that can help developing countries to upgrade their industry. A few examples are given in the end.

Description: Alliance networks are the underlying structures of social systems in business, management, and society. The sustainability and dynamics of a social system rely on the structural evolutions of the topologies. Understanding the evolution sheds light on the dynamics and sustainability of a social system. Minority game models have been successfully applied across social science, economy, management, and engineering. They provide simple yet applicable modeling to articulate the evolutionary cooperation dynamics of competitive players in binary decision situations. By extending the minority games played in alliance networks, the cooperation in structured systems of different network topologies is analyzed. In this model, local and global score strategies are considered with and without cooperation rewiring options. The cooperation level, the score, and the topological properties are investigated. The research uses a numerical simulation approach on random networks, scale-free networks, and small-world networks. The results suggest that the network rewiring strategy leads to higher systemic performance with a higher score and a higher level of stability in decision-making. Competitive decision-making can lead to a higher level of cooperation from a poor initial start. However, stubbornness in decision-making can lead to a poor situation when cooperation is discouraged. Players with local or global information adopt local and global score strategies. The results show that local strategies might lead to imbalance, while a global strategy might achieve a relatively stable outcome. This work contributes to bridge minority games in structured networks to study the cooperation between formation and evolution, and calls for future minority game modeling on social networks.