Things Fall Apart

Contracts and externalities: How things fall apart

A single principal interacts with several agents, offering them contracts. The crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside-option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many “free agents” there are (these are agents who are not under contract). We study how such a principal, unwelcome though he may be, approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination fai...

Things Fall Apart: Topology Change from Winding Tachyons

We argue that closed string tachyons drive two spacetime topology changing transitions – loss of genus in a Riemann surface and separation of a Riemann surface into two components. The tachyons of interest are localized versions of Scherk-Schwarz winding string tachyons arising on Riemann surfaces in regions of moduli space where string-scale tubes develop. Spacetime and world-sheet renormaliza...

Things Fall Apart : The ‘ End Game ’ Dynamics of Internal Wars

Most internal wars end on the battlefield. In comparison to inter-state conflicts, a relatively small percentage of these fights are concluded at the negotiating table. While significant attention has been given to how and why internal wars begin and even how they begin to evolve, little attention has been given to how they are concluded. What research has been done on this subject has focused ...

Things fall apart: biological species form unconnected parsimony networks.

The generality of operational species definitions is limited by problematic definitions of between-species divergence. A recent phylogenetic species concept based on a simple objective measure of statistically significant genetic differentiation uses between-species application of statistical parsimony networks that are typically used for population genetic analysis within species. Here we revi...

Why do Things Fall Apart? A Psychological Analysis of Okonkwo's Personality and his Ultimate Demise in Chinua Achebe's Novel Things Fall Apart