Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 9: Economic Models
SOE 9.4: Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 12:15–12:30, GÖR/0226
Identifying higher order cascading failures in supply chain networks of a national economy — •Jan Fialkowski1,2, Stefan Thurner1,2,4, and Shlomo Havlin3 — 1Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria — 2Institute of the Science of Complex Systems, CeDAS, Medical University Vienna, Vienna, Austria — 3Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel — 4Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, USA
Cascading Failure scenarios are a central concern for the design of complex systems. In financial and economic systems these cascading failures give rise to the notion of systemic risk, where the failure of a single entity leads to large disruptions in the entire system. Exhaustively examining the failure of larger sets of elements is difficult due to computational constraints. Here we study the recently introduced notion of economic systemic risk in national supply chain networks of firm-firm interactions. We use an empirical dataset of the ecuadorian economy, consisting of almost 100.000 firms and more than three million buyer-supplier links. Using a modification of the "Random Chemistry" method we can identify small sets of firms, whose simultaneous failure leads to failure cascades that are larger than would be expected from their individual failure cascades.We compare the final cascade size of the small sets of firms with the sum of cascade sizes of the individual firm failures and find pairs that are up to 260 times more destructive than the individual firms themselves. We also provide a classification of the underlying mechanisms leading to this strong increase of the final cascade size.
Keywords: Systemic risk; Supply chain network; Cascading failure; Higher order failure