The key idea of this model is that firms are the result of an evolutionary process. Based on demand and supply considerations the evolutionary model presented here derives explicitly Gibrat's law of proportionate effects as the result of the competition between products. Applying a preferential attachment mechanism for firms the theory allows to establish the size distribution of products and firms. Also established are the growth rate and price distribution of consumer goods. Taking into account the characteristic property of human activities to occur in bursts, the model allows also an explanation of the size-variance relationship of the growth rate distribution of products and firms. Further the product life cycle, the learning (experience) curve and the market size in terms of the mean number of firms that can survive in a market are derived. The model also suggests the existence of an invariant of a market as the ratio of total profit to total revenue. The relationship between a neo-classic and an evolutionary view of a market is discussed. The comparison with empirical investigations suggests that the theory is able to describe the main stylized facts concerning the size and growth of firms.

Online popularity has an enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems: the Wikipedia and an entire country’s Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and interevent time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics

We introduce a class of utility-based market makers that always accept orders at their risk-neutral prices. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for such market makers to have bounded loss. We prove that hyperbolic absolute risk aversion utility market makers are equivalent to weighted pseudospherical scoring rule market makers. In particular, Hanson's logarithmic scoring rule market maker corresponds to a negative exponential utility market maker in our framework. We describe a third equivalent formulation based on maintaining a cost function that seems most natural for implementation purposes, and we illustrate how to translate among the three equivalent formulations. We examine the tradeoff between the market's liquidity and the market maker's worst-case loss. For a fixed bound on worst-case loss, some market makers exhibit greater liquidity near uniform prices and some exhibit greater liquidity near extreme prices, but no market maker can exhibit uniformly greater liquidity in all regimes. For a fixed minimum liquidity level, we give the lower bound of market maker's worst-case loss under some regularity conditions.

By analysing the evolution of the street network of Greater London from the late 1700s to the present, we are able to shed light on the inner mechanisms that lie behind the growth of a city. First we define an object called a city as a spatial discontinuous phenomena, from clustering the density of street intersections. Second, we find that the city growth mechanisms can be described by two logistic laws, hence can be determined by a simple model of urban network growth in the presence of competition for limited space.

We present conditions under which positive alpha exists in the realm of active portfolio management- in contrast to the controversial result in Jarrow (2010, pg. 20) which implicates delegated portfolio management by surmising that positive alphas are illusionary. Specifically, we show that the critical assumption used in Jarrow (2010, pg. 20), to derive the illusionary alpha result, is based on a zero set for CAPM with Lebesgue measure zero. So conclusions based on that assumption may well have probability measure zero of occurrence as well. Technically, the existence of [Tanaka] local time on a zero set for CAPM implies existence of positive alphas. In fact, we show that positive alpha exists under the same scenarios of "perpetual event swap" and "market systemic event" Jarrow (2010) used to formulate the illusionary positive alpha result. First, we prove that as long as asset price volatility is greater than zero, systemic events like market crash will occur in finite time almost surely. Thus creating an opportunity to hedge against that event. Second, we find that Jarrow's "false positive alpha" variable constitutes portfolio manager reward for trading strategy. For instance, we show that positive alpha exists if portfolio managers develop hedging strategies based on either (1) an exotic [barrier] option on the underlying asset - with barrier hitting time motivated by the "market systemic" event, or (2) a swaption strategy for the implied interest rate risk inherent in Jarrow's triumvirate of riskless rate of return, factor sensitivity exposure, and constant risk premium for a perpetual event swap.