![]() ![]() ![]() The top right quadrant describes a deal that benefits both participants: you sell a good pig at an honest price to the other person. In the original paper by Carlo Cipolla, the example involved selling an old and valueless pig to another person for a high price. Starting with the top left quadrant, we have a situation in which helpless people damage themselves while providing an advantage to the other person. ![]() Typically, the x−axis refers to the observer (you), while the y−axis to the second agent (“the other person”). It is a versatile model: playing with the signs of the coefficients it can describe widely different behaviors, such as the attraction of Juliet and Romeo in Shakespeare’s play. More recently, the LV model has been applied to oil extraction, the 19th century whaling industry, and the production cycle of modern fisheries. Later on, the model was used extensively to describe economic systems by Goodwin, starting in 1965, although there may have been even earlier applications. It is worth remembering that Volterra himself developed it not to study an ecosystem, but an economic system: the fisheries of the Adriatic Sea. This model is normally presented in textbooks as dealing with biological systems, but it has a wide range of applications. Here, we take a fresh look at Cipolla’s theory using an approach that goes in parallel with those used in other fields of the study of complex systems: we use the model known as “Lotka–Volterra” (LV), also known as the “predator–prey” or “foxes and rabbits” model. ![]()
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