A model in which heterogeneous agents form firms is described and empirically tested. Each agent has preferences for both income and leisure and provides a variable input ('effort') to production. There are increasing returns to cooperation, and agents self-organize into productive teams. Within...

Self-organization was originally introduced in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic structures in out-of-equilibrium systems. Recent research, that extends this concept to ethology, suggests that it provides a concise description of...

A simple model of recruitment-based foraging in ants illustrates the idea that synchronized patterns of activity can endow a colony with the ability to forage more efficiently when a minimal number of active individuals is required to establish and maintain food source exploitation. This model,...

A simple model of the emergence of pillars in termite nests (Deneubourg, 1977) is modified to include several additional features that break the homogeneity of the original model: (1) a convection air stream that drives molecules of pheromone along a given direction, (2) a net flux of...

The paper discusses the role of self-organizing phenomena like emergence of infrastructure and self-organizing criticality in a spatial economy. Some theoretical models are discussed and reviewed. Computer models in the form of simple cellular automata, similar to the game "Life" and Schelling's...

Why are some ecosystems so rich, but yet contain so many rare species? High species diversity, together with rarity, is a general trend in neotropical forests and coral reefs. But the origin of such diversity and the consequences of food web complexity in both species abundances and temporal...

Most models of natural selection assume either that the material environment remains constant or that it fluctuates in ways unrelated to changes in gene frequencies (and therefore changes in the distribution of phenotypes) of the organism undergoing selection. In this paper, we consider what...

In the study of complex systems---in particular self-organizing systems---the notions of emergence and higher order structures come up. A framework for studying them was given in [1,2] where the notion of a hyperstructures occur both in an intuitive and a formal sense. But in formalizations of...

Complex, fractal structures are widespread in ecological systems and in some characteristic features of evolutionary processes. The origin of such patterns in terms of their dynamics is a challenging problem. A theory for these phenomena might have important implications in issues like the...

Highly optimized tolerance is a model of optimization in engineered systems, which gives rise to power-law distributions of failure events in such systems. The archetypal example is the highly optimized forest fire model. Here we give an analytic solution for this model which explains the origin...