The paper deals with the description of the issues related to the dynamics of the real estate market in terms of sharp, unexpected changes in the housing prices which have been observed in the last decade in many European countries due to some macroeconomic circumstances. When such perturbations appear, the real estate market is said to be structurally unstable, since even a small variation in the control parameters might result in a large, structural change in the state of the whole system. The essential problem addressed in the paper is the need to define and discriminate between the intervals of stable and unstable real estate market development with special attention paid to the latter. The research aims at modeling hardly explored field of discontinuous changes in the real estate market in order to reveal the bifurcation edge. Assuming that the periods of sudden price changes reflect an intrinsic property of the real estate market, it is shown that the evolution path draws for most of the time a smooth curve onto the stability area of the equilibrium surface, and only briefly penetrates into the instability area to hop to another equilibrium state.
The paper describes application of catastrophe theory for analysis of trends of real estate prices inPoznan. It turns out that the evolution of the real estate market is comprised of two main processes: long-term evolution in the area of a non-degenerate stability and discontinuous, rapid changes in the area of a degenerate stability. In the macro scale, the construction and developing branch contributes largely to the Gross Domestic Product affecting overall economic environment. In the micro scale, however, the knowledge about future price trends may help to decide whether or not to buy or sell the house property.
Forecasting social phenomena may be hampered in many ways. This is because in nature of these phenomena lies strong and multilateral connection with other social phenomena; but not only – also physical and biological (natural) ones. The content of this publication constitutes presentation of chosen problems of forecasting in social sciences. The attention in the article was focused among others on deterministic chaos theory, on the attempt of its implementation to phenomena from the scope (or from borderline) of social sciences: economy, logistics, science about safety etc. Moreover, one of the threads of ponderation was the attempt to consider whether it’s possible to create so-called final theory. The aim of the publication is to signalize possibilities of taking advantage of seemingly exotic for “political scientists” methodology of modeling and explaining phenomena, having its source in exact sciences (in chaos theory) to study social phenomena and processes.
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