Since the classic work of Feyerabend and Kuhn, the role of social factors in the scientific enterprise has been a major concern in the philosophy and history of science. In particular, the presence of social factors such as the desire for prestige or pressures to conform to accepted ideas, have...

Inefficient delays in trades can sometimes be observed after the arrival of important public news. This paper explains these phenomena with a model in which agents defer trades in the fear that they may be taken advantaged of by better informed trading partners. Under certain conditions, delay...

General equilibrium theory in economics defines the relative prices for goods and services, but does not fix the absolute values of prices. We present a theory of money in which the value of money is a time dependent "strategic variable," to be chosen by the individual agents. The idea is...

The widespread use and proven profitability of technical trading rules in financial markets has long been a puzzle in academic finance. In this paper we show, using an agent-based model of an evolving stock market, that widespread technical trading can arise due to a multi-person prisoners'...

An important puzzle in the study of complex systems is the conditions under which the aggregation of information from interacting agents results in a stable or an unstable collective outcome. We present a general framework for thinking about the stability and instability of collective outcomes...

Where genetically unrelated members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of self-regarding, outcome-oriented preferences. We call this strong reciprocity. We distinguish...

This paper is concerned with the governance of vertical interfirm relations, i.e. relations between buyers and their suppliers on industrial, intermediate-goods markets. Networks of interacting, adaptive buyers and suppliers are viewed as complex adaptive systems (Holland and Miller 1991), which...

This paper contains a description of a general class of city formation models. Individual economic agents have preferences for locations that depend on the population distribution. A location's attractiveness depends upon some combination of its population and its average distance to other...

In this paper, I formally define uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity both as measures of problems and environments and as analytic paragdigms and discuss the importance of the difficulty and uncertainty paradigms in the study of institutions. <p> <p> <!--To appear in: .

Monitoring by peers in work teams, credit associations, partner- ships, local commons situations, and residential neighborhoods is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the incentives to engage in mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on...