The purpose of the paper is to find out the borrowing cost premia for those individuals who are liquidity-constrained, or who are first-time buyers of real estate. The analysis uses the similarity of a leveraged purchase with the exercise of a call option to defer the purchase of the asset....

Agricultural production is among the riskiest production activities. Similarly to other branches of agriculture in animal breeding the finished product is the result of complex procedures. The biological-technological procedure, the creation of the product is affected by an outstanding number of...

The application of computer simulation as a research method raises two important questions: (1) Does simulation really offer added value over established methods? (2) How can the danger of arbitrariness caused by the extended modelling possibilities be minimised? We present the concept of...

The simulation of promotional competitions in corporations described herein allows comparisons of suggested reasons for the paucity of women in the highest level of corporate management. Runs with small, medium and large-sized companies all give similar results. The strongest effect is evidenced...

Using the "meme" conception (Dawkins 1976) of cultural transmission and computer simulations, an exploration is made of the relationship between agents, their beliefs about their environment, communication of those beliefs, and the global behaviours that emerge in a simple artificial society....

EpiSimS is a massive simulation of the movements, activities, and social interactions of individuals in realistic synthetic populations, and of the dynamics of contagious disease spread on the resulting social contact network. This paper describes the assumptions and methodology in the EpiSimS...

Very often in the history of mankind, social changes took place because a minority was successful in persuading the dominant majority of a new idea. Social psychology provides empirically well-founded theories of social influence that can explain the power of minorities at individual level. In...

There is growing advocacy for the adoption of computational methods as a substitute for, or complement to, traditional research methods, particularly for examining social phenomena derivative of organised complexity. This paper examines some of the reasons for this advocacy and the specific...

A simulation model must be verified to confirm that it describes correctly its intended real world process under study; moreover, the simulation results obtained must be a valid representation of the process. This study presents three activity-based white-box methods for assisting a user in...