The method allows us to identify microstructure effects on the asset price dynamics. This scale-free structure is a result of the pontaneous growth of the web, but is not necessarily the optimal one for efficient transport. We introduce an appropriate figure of merit and suggest that a planning of few big links, acting as information highways, may noticeably increase the efficiency of the net without affecting its robustness. It is well known that chess pieces can be sacrificed in order to win the overall game. In population genetics, the fitness of an animal species ometimes declines first before evolving to a higher level of survival fitness.
Engineers know that unstable control systems paradoxically stabilize if combined in the right way.
The answer is yes. This strikingly counterintuitive result is called Parrondo's Paradox and has appeared in Nature, Vol. 402, Dec. 1999, p. 864. We will take a look at some simple examples and show that this effect is in fact a discrete-time manifestation of a Brownian ratchet. Future development of Parrondian strategies that can help to model cases where declining birth-death processes combine in a beneficial way are thus of great interest.