Since the classic work of Feyerabend and Kuhn, the role of social factors in the scientific enterprise has been a major concern in the philosophy and history of science. In particular, the presence of social factors such as the desire for prestige or pressures to conform to accepted ideas, have...

Inefficient delays in trades can sometimes be observed after the arrival of important public news. This paper explains these phenomena with a model in which agents defer trades in the fear that they may be taken advantaged of by better informed trading partners. Under certain conditions, delay...

In the framework of the median voter theorem, an ideologically driven candidate can fully alter policy when running against a vote-maximizing oponent. When turnout is allowed to depend on the relative positioning of the ideal points of the candidates relative to the voter, this result need not...

General equilibrium theory in economics defines the relative prices for goods and services, but does not fix the absolute values of prices. We present a theory of money in which the value of money is a time dependent "strategic variable," to be chosen by the individual agents. The idea is...

It is sometimes thought that philosophers have little to offer those who think about the science of complex systems. There are, however, two philosophical ideas that seem crucial in considering the very definition of complexity. The first is the distinction between "ontology" and "epistemology",...

The widespread use and proven profitability of technical trading rules in financial markets has long been a puzzle in academic finance. In this paper we show, using an agent-based model of an evolving stock market, that widespread technical trading can arise due to a multi-person prisoners'...

Incomplete information, local interaction, and random matching games all share a common structure. A type or player interacts with various subsets of the set of all types/players. A type/player's total payoff is additive in the payoffs from these various interactions. This paper describes a...

An important puzzle in the study of complex systems is the conditions under which the aggregation of information from interacting agents results in a stable or an unstable collective outcome. We present a general framework for thinking about the stability and instability of collective outcomes...

Where genetically unrelated members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of self-regarding, outcome-oriented preferences. We call this strong reciprocity. We distinguish...

This paper is concerned with the governance of vertical interfirm relations, i.e. relations between buyers and their suppliers on industrial, intermediate-goods markets. Networks of interacting, adaptive buyers and suppliers are viewed as complex adaptive systems (Holland and Miller 1991), which...