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Actor Concentration

What It Measures

Actor Concentration measures how narrowly the actions driving a crisis are concentrated among a small number of actors. A high score means one or two parties are responsible for the bulk of destabilising moves; a low score means activity is diffuse across many participants. Concentration is associated with higher unpredictability: crises dominated by a single opaque actor are harder to forecast and de-escalate than crises with many transparent parties.

How It Is Calculated

The system extracts actor entities from AI-generated event detail fields using named entity recognition. For each 7-day window it computes a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) over the distribution of event actions attributed to each actor. HHI ranges from near 0 (perfectly diffuse) to 1 (single actor responsible for everything). The raw HHI is reported directly as the Actor Concentration score.

Actor attribution is imperfect — many events are attributed to unnamed forces or governments — so the score should be treated as directionally correct rather than precise.

Interpreting High and Low Values

High (above 0.6): One actor is disproportionately driving events. Watch that actor's leadership signals and internal politics closely; a single decision by that actor could rapidly change the crisis trajectory in either direction.

Low (below 0.3): Many actors are contributing to the crisis. While this can mean broader instability, it also tends to mean no single actor can unilaterally escalate to the highest levels. Coalition-building and multilateral diplomacy are more likely to be effective in this regime.

Data Sources and Update Frequency

Actor entities are extracted from the detail field of events in the POLYCRISIS database by the Haiku extraction pipeline. Quality depends on the granularity of detail text provided by source articles. Updated daily.

Other Indicators

Escalation Probability Event Intensity Signal Velocity Confidence Drift Market Contagion Narrative Contagion Anomaly Index
Methodology · Risk Index · Events

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