As computer networks grow and blanket the planet, they become a community of concurrent processes, which, in their interactions, strategies, and lack of perfect knowledge, become analogous to human market economies. Economics may thus offer new ways of designing and understanding the behavior of...

We present a dynamical theory ofasset price bubbles that exhibits the appearance of bubbles and their subsequent crashes. We show that when speculative trends dominate over fundamental beliefs, bubbles form, leading to the growth of asset prices away from their fundamental value. This growth...

We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property,...

Large distributed multiagent systems are characterized by vast numbers of agents trying to gain access to limited resources in an unpredictable environment. Agents in these system continuously switch strategies in order to opportunistically find improvements in their utilities. We have analyzed...

We present a two-level model of organizational training and agent production. Managers decide whether or not to train based on both the costs of training compared to the benefits and on their expectations and observations of the number of other firms that also train. Managers also take into...

As information technology (IT) and services become more prevalent within the enterprise, the burden of greater expertise on computer technology falls on companies whose primary mission may not be information technology management. This has led to the emergence of computation resource services...

The phenomenon of electronic commerce has led to a proliferation of web sites competing for the attention and resources of millions of consumers. As has been recently shown, the resulting dynamics is such that a few sites command most of the traffic in the web, a signature of a winner-take-all...

We consider scheduling in distributed systems from a game theoretic point view while taking into account queuing theory methodologies. In this approach no one knows the global state of the system while users try to maximize their utility. Since the performance of such a blind scheduler is worse...

Much has been said about the possibility that in the information age, ease of entry and global access will lead to market characteristics with few inefficiencies. While several arguments have been articulated on the nature of markets and electronic commerce, little is known about their...

Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show that for a broad set of beliefs and group characteristics cooperation can appear...