Vacancy chains can be tracked in any context where a the availability of a desirable resource triggers a cascade of occupations through which the scarce resource flows through different owners. However, under certain conditions vacancy chains, rather than markets or other forms of competition,...

Schumpeter maintained that oscillations of macroeconomic variables are only the “secondary wave” of business cycles, a reflex of more fundamental “primary waves” at the microeconomic level caused by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Uniting Schumpeter’s concern for innovation...

Learning curves can arise out of routing problems, or out of sequencing problems, or a combination of both. In this paper, learning curves arising out of routing problems are investigated by means of numerical simulations, whereas some properties of the learning curves arising out of sequencing...

Cohen, March and Olsen\'s Garbage Can Model (GCM) of organizational choice represent perhaps the first – and remains by far the most influential –agent-based representation of organizational decision processes. According to the GCM organizations are conceptualized as crossroads of...

This article presents an agent-based modelof Prato, an Italian textile district where thousands of sma1l firms specialise into tiny phases of the whole production process. It is an empirical model at scale 1: 1 that reconstructs the information flows between economic actors and connects them to...

What are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce when production is carried out by a number of small firms specialized in single production phases? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and innovative experience of a local Internet in the...

This article presents a model of the structure of the information flows that underlie the creation of production chains between thousands of small textile firms located in Prato, central Italy. Contrary to most textile industry of western Europe and north America, Prato did not die out once...

This article presents an agent-based model of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialise in particular phases of fabrics production. It is an empirical model that reconstructs the communications between firms when they arrange production chains. In their turn,...