A simple agent-based model of business units lending money to one another is sufficient to understand on what conditions avalanches of bankruptcies may arise. The model highlights the consequences of specialisation into money lending as well as the impact of preferential lending relations.

Organizational theory has construed complexity as an objective characteristic of either the structure or the behaviour of an organization. We argue that to further our understanding it should be understood in terms of human cognition of a structure or behavior. This cognitive twist is...

Shafer's evidence theory is a branch of the mathematics of uncertain reasoning that allows for novel possibilities to be conceived by a decision-maker. Many of its findings exhibit striking similarities with an alternative decision theory put forward by Shackle in the 1950s, before expected...

The investment acceleration principle is a heuristic for modeling investment time series out of consumption time series. The model presented herein develops a disaggregated accelerator equation whose coefficients are the weights of a Kohonen neural net that represents firms' decision-making....

Evidence Theory is a branch of mathematics that concerns the combination of empirical evidence in an individual's mind in order to construct a coherent picture of reality. Designed to deal with unexpected empirical evidence suggesting new possibilities, evidence theory has a lot in common with...

This article presents a model of the structure of information fluxes that underlie the creation of production chains in a textile district located in Prato, Tuscany, central Italy. Contrary to most textile districts in western Europe and north America, Prato did not extinct once average salaries...

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...

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...