We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic data may suggest parts of social order that can usefully...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Brown and Shannon (2002) derived an equivalent system of...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Brown and Shannon (2002) derived an equivalent system of...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...

In an incomplete asset market, firms assign values to investment plans by projecting their payoffs on the span of the payoffs of marketed assets; equivalently, firms employ the Capital Asset Pricing Model. This is a criterion that does not require firms to possess information, such as the...

A general and practical competitive market model for trading indivisible goods is introduced. There are a group of buyers and a group of sellers, and several indivisible goods. Each buyer is initially endowed with a sufficient amount of money and each seller is endowed with several units of each...

This paper provides an analysis of the asymptotic properties of consumption allocations in a stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous consumers. In particular we investigate the market selection hypothesis, that markets favor traders with more accurate beliefs. We show that in any...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Following Brown and Shannon (2000), we reformulate the...