The Unlucky Investor – Chapter 4: Methodology and Settings (Biomagnification Contamination Model)

his deposit contains the complete reproducible materials for Chapter 4: Methodology and Settings of the thesis:

“The Unlucky Investor: How Even “Clean-Shot” Investments Are Contaminated by Upstream Pollution – A Natural-Science Approach to Financial Decision-Making in Opaque Markets” by Philipp Gandolfi (May 2026).

Contents

• Full polished text of Chapter 4 (sections 4.1–4.7)
• Mixed-methods research design and operationalisation of the Biomagnification Contamination Model
• Detailed hardware, software, and containerised environment specifications (Docker 27.1 + Singularity 3.11)
• Data sources, preprocessing pipelines, and financial food-web network construction
• Monte-Carlo simulation design (10,000 runs per scenario), parameter calibration, random-seed strategy, and full reproducibility protocols

These materials form the methodological foundation for the empirical analysis in Chapters 5 and 6. All Monte-Carlo simulations, sensitivity analyses, and figures presented in the thesis can be exactly reproduced using the accompanying codebase.

Links

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/philippgandolfi/unlucky-investor-thesis
• Zenodo DOI for this record: (assigned automatically upon publication)

Reproducibility declaration: All empirical results, figures, and tables in this thesis that depend on Chapter 4 can be regenerated exactly from the publicly released codebase, containerised environment, provided data, and fixed random seeds.