More than thirty years ago Milton Friedman proposed a 'plucking' model of business fluctuations in which output cannot exceed a ceiling level, but will, from time to time, be plucked downward by recession. The model implied that business fluctuations are asymmetric, that recessions have only a...

The current paper attempts to describe the labor market parameter dynamics using a different method, namely the semi-Markovian processes. This method allows for the labor market study without the large fluctuations that occurred at a certain moment in time impinging upon the results of the...

This article presents alternative scenarios of macroeconomic dynamics for Romania. The author starts by presenting the structure of the model used for simulations. Two scenarios are developed for the 2003-2010 period. The first one, the desirable scenario, embodies performances envisaged in the...

We present a model of growth and technology transfer based on the idea that technologies are specific to particular combinations of inputs. We argue that this model is more realistic that the usual specification in which an improvement in any technique for producing a given good improves all...

A theory is developed which predicts that people with relatively extreme opinions are relativly rigid in that they are less inclined to modify their opinions. That extremists tend to be rigid and moderates tend to be flexible is found to hold for members of Congress.

The paper is about the economic modelling of aggregate consumption expenditure with particular emphasis on the distribution effect of income. Under certain assumptions on the evolution over time of the population of households ("structural stability") we shall derive a first order approximation...

In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. "Relative Utilitarianism" consists of first normalising individual von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them. This...

We address the problem of allocating indivisible goods and some amount of an infinitely divisible good among agents with equal rights on these resources. Our specific objective is to investigate the implications of the following requirement on allocation rules : when the preferences of some of...

We study environments where a production process is jointly shared by a finite group of agents. The social decision involves the determination of input contribution and output distribution. We define a competitive solution when there is decreasing returns-to-scale and show that it leads to a...

One of the most significant and robust characteristics of decision making is persistence. An example of this is brand loyalty -- the repeat purchase of new products of the same brand. This paper attempts to show that previous explanations of this phenomenon (switching costs, habit and unobserved...