This paper builds upon a view of economic system and individual economic organization as problem-solving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problem-solving driven by trial-and-error and collective selection. The institutional structure, and in particular its degree of...

As emphasized by Barney (1986), any explanation of superior profitability must account for why the resources supporting such profitability could have been acquired for a price below their rent generating capacity. Building upon the literature in economics on coordination failures and incomplete...

The capability-based view of the firm is based on the assumption that firms know how to do things. Assuming the existence of a thing called `organizational knowledge', in the first part of the paper we identify its main building blocks and we provide a description of its inner structure. This...

This paper offers a sketch of what an economic theory of the firm would look like if it were founded on the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, particularly on Chapters 1-2 of his Theory of Economic Development. Schumpeterian analysis requires an intuitively appealing and realistic conceptualization...

The paper compares the properties of market dynamics, under different trading protocols. At an empirical level, we present some evidence stemming from the comparison between different intra-daily trade regimes within the world largest Stock Exchanges. Such evidence also motivates the...

The last quarter-century has seen the rise of an almost religious belief in the efficacy of market organization of economic activity. While there are strong empirically supported reasons for a bias toward market organization, particularly considering the alternatives, there are many areas of...

In uniform price, sealed-bid day-ahead electricity auctions, the market price is set at the intersection between aggregate demand and supply functions built by a market operator. Each day, just one agent - the marginal generator - owns the market-clearing plant. Day-ahead auctions are moreover...

In this paper we present a simple agent based model aimed to the qualitative description of some ``stylized facts'' typical of financial markets. The framework is a simple two assets model: a riskless bond, with a constant riskless return and a risky stock, paying constant dividends. Both the...