Managing Complexity: Insights, Concepts, Applications

Each chapter in Managing Complexity focuses on analyzing real-world complex systems and transferring knowledge from the complex-systems sciences to applications in business, industry and society. The interdisciplinary contributions range from markets and production through logistics, traffic control, and critical infrastructures, up to network design, information systems, social conflicts and building consensus. They serve to raise readers' awareness concerning the often counter-intuitive behavior of complex systems and to help them integrate insights gained in complexity research into everyday planning, decision making, strategic optimization, and policy.

Intended for a broad readership, the contributions have been kept largely non-technical and address a general, scientifically literate audience involved in corporate, academic, and public institutions.

Managing Complexity: An Introduction.- Managing Complexity: An Introduction.- Markets and Business.- Market Segmentation: The Network Approach.- Managing Autonomy and Control in Economic Systems.- Complexity and the Enterprise: The Illusion of Control.- Logistics and Production.- Benefits and Drawbacks of Simple Models for Complex Production Systems.- Logistics Networks: Coping with Nonlinearity and Complexity.- Repeated Auction Games and Learning Dynamics in Electronic Logistics Marketplaces: Complexity, Bounded Rationality, and Regulation through Information.- Traffic.- Decentralized Approaches to Adaptive Traffic Control.- Critical Infrastructures Vulnerability: The Highway Networks.- Critical Infrastructures and Systemic Risks.- Trade Credit Networks and Systemic Risk.- A Complex System’s View of Critical Infrastructures.- Information Systems.- Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer Systems.- Coping with Information Overload through Trust-Based Networks.- Confiict and Consensus.- Complexity in Human Conflict.- Fostering Consensus in Multidimensional Continuous Opinion Dynamics under Bounded Confidence.- Multi-Stakeholder Governance - Emergence and Transformational Potential of a New Political Paradigm.- Confiict and Consensus.- Evolutionary Engineering of Complex Functional Networks.- Path Length Scaling and Discrete Effects in Complex Networks.