Organized crime satisfies a demand for necessary social services in the absence of effective government institutions. This paper examines the rise of the Sicilian mafia. Using system dynamics, we model this system and test various policies to determine what factors have the greatest impact on...

Systems thinking skills have been recognized as part of the core science literacy, and more recently, as critical 21st century skills. While several studies have investigated how games can be used to facilitate students' systems thinking skills, little is known about how teachers can design...

A generic system embodies basic principles and insights that are common to a set of diverse cases and situations. For example, a generic system called quot;limits to growthquot; captures the constraints experienced by an organization due to the scarcity of an important resource. Its...

Background. Research shows that learning and task performance improve when participants in management exercises understand the structure of the system they control. However, the majority of business simulators are “black-boxes.”Aim. This article introduces structural debriefing, which is a...

This paper utilizes the dynastic cycle framework proposed in (K. Saeed & Pavlov, 2008) to explain the role of dissent in universities. By combining the dissent expression framework (Kassing, 2011) and the dynastic cycle structure, we construct a generic model for dissent in organizations. The...

Organized crime satisfies the demand for protection and enforcement of property rights in the absence of effective government institutions. However, weak law enforcement alone cannot explain the cross-regional differences in mafia activity. This chapter develops a feedback model of economic...

In this paper we investigate the effects of network topologies on asset price dynamics. We introduce network communications into a simple asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs. The agents may switch between several belief types according to their performance. The performance information...

In this chapter, I used the strategy dynamics methodology, which is a combination of the resource-based theory and system dynamics, to explain the sustained ability of two online channels to deliver economic value to its users. I posed that since spam and file-sharing applications are acutely...

Peer-to-peer technology has made massive music piracy possible, which, in turn, has arguably had a significant economic impact on the recording industry. Record labels have responded to online piracy with litigation and are also considering self-help measures. It is currently not obvious whether...