The location of Kyrgyzstan’s Naryn province within the Tian Shan Mountains of Central Asia makes the country especially sensitive to the effects of global climate change. It is a poor region where over 70 percent of rural residents support themselves through small-scale agriculture and animal herding, activities that depend on ecosystem services including natural grassland productivity and melt...

We have witnessed the worst global financial crisis in a century and the repercussions are still being felt in developed and developing countries alike. A dangerous cocktail of short-term gains prevailing over long-term interests, herding, increasing pressure to deliver results, the absence of effective oversight, and blind trust that the system would regulate itself eventually exploded when Le...

We investigate asset returns using the concept of beta herding, which measures cross-sectional variations in betas due to changes investors’ confidence about their market outlook. Overconfidence causes herding (compression towards beta), while under-confidence leads adverse (dispersion from beta). show that low-beta anomaly can be explained by a return reversal following as high stocks underper...

In this postmortem, I find that the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system’s demise. The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to cre...

The PNAS article by Stiner et al. (1), “A forager–herder trade-off, from broad-spectrum hunting to sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey,” adds a major new element to our evidence for—and understanding of— the appearance of the first animal herding in southwest Asia, involving the earliest management of caprines (managed caprines including sheep and goat), as well as an important methodologi...

Resource allocation takes place in various types of real-world complex systems such as urban traffic, social services institutions, economical and ecosystems. Mathematically, the dynamical process of resource allocation can be modeled as minority games. Spontaneous evolution of the resource allocation dynamics, however, often leads to a harmful herding behavior accompanied by strong fluctuation...

We propose a Statistical-Mechanics inspired framework for modeling economic systems. Each agent composing the economic system is characterized by a few variables of distinct nature (e.g. saving ratio, expectations, etc.). The agents interact locally by their individual variables: for example, people working in the same office may influence their peers’ expectations (optimism/pessimism are conta...