BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

OLIGOPOLY STATES (Law of) 1)2)4)

← Back

"If there are competing organizations, the instability of their relations and hence the danger of frictions and conflicts increase with the decrease of the number of those organizations." (L.von BERTALANFFY, 1956, p.8).

This law, which was first stated by V. VOLTERRA (1931), is applicable for example to competitive populations: thus ecological systems with numerous complementary species are more stable than those which count with only some few (This is why monocultivation brings along so many problems). VOLTERRA showed that in systems scantily diversified, destruction of the prey species by the predatory can lead to the disappearance of the latter altogether, due to the lack of any alternate resources.

The application of the law to economical oligopolies is not so obvious, but would be an interesting subject for scrutiny. Moreover, while conflicts between a reduced number of very big organizations can be very costly, it should be interesting to consider other aspects as for example the total costs of numerous small local conflicts between organizations of a lesser size, or what could be the significance of a prey-predator analogue relation between differentiated organizations.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint