Review of "Decoding Complexity: Uncovering Patterns in Economic Networks" by James Grattfelder

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/4/reviews/2.html

James Grattfelder's book develops a set of analytical and numerical tools which investigate the economic system as a large scale network. The starting point is that companies' economic decisions are made by the shareholders that control them. Therefore, the precondition to understand companies' behaviour is to investigate their ownership structure which control depends on. By studying massive amounts of ownership data, Grattfelder discovers that, unknown to most economists, the global economy system forms a network characterized by a very large connected component. This book is the Ph.D. thesis of the author, realized at ETH in Zurich. The main methodological innovation and empirical findings have been already published in peer-reviewed journals, but here they find a more comprehensive systematization. Probably every network scientist is familiar with some of its main results through the ample publicity that Grattfelder's work had in popular media. Nevertheless, this manuscript is very good reading for anyone interested in going beyond the flagship results to familiarize with their scientific derivation.