In this paper, we construct a computational model of Tiebout competition. We show that the notion that Tiebout competition, as a result of enforcing efficiency, renders institutional arrangements unimportant does not preclude the possibility that political institutions may differ in their...

We study the relationship between voters' preferences and the composition of party platforms in two-party democratic elections with adaptive parties. In the model, a political party locally adapts a platform on an electoral landscape. The electoral landscape is determined by the preferences of...

In this paper, we address the use of adaptive computational modeling techniques in the field of political economy. The introduction considers the advantages of computational methods. The bulk of the paper describe two computational models: a spatial model of electoral competition and a Tiebout...

We explore the dynamics of a model of two-party competition under spatial voting. the parties are allowed to {\it incrementally} adapt their platforms by following the voting gradient imposed by the preferences of the electorate and platform of the opposition. The emphasis in this model is on...

Simulation models are becoming increasingly common in the analysis of critical scientific, policy, and management issues. Such models provide a way to analyze complex systems characterized by both large parameter spaces and nonlinear interactions. Unfortunately, these same characteristics make...

Communication plays a vital role in the organization and operation of biological, computational, economic, and social systems. Agents often base their behavior on the signals they receive from others and also recognize the importance of the signals they send. Here we develop a framework for...

The organization of information processing resources is a central question in economic, organizational, and computational theory. Recent work by Radner (1992) and others has developed a simple theoretical framework and some useful formal mathematical results about the behavior of such systems....

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: .

In this paper, we construct a general model of diverse problem solvers of limited abilities. We use this model to derive two main results: (1) a collection of diverse, bounded problem solvers can locate optimal solutions to difficult problems and (2) a collection of problem solvers of diverse...