With the increased penetration of digital technologies into entrepreneurship, the traditional need for proximity to specific locations or large amounts of funding for infrastructure development has diminished. Instead, digital entrepreneurs now pursue locations that provide more opportunities...

I use a model of human causal learning, Causal Support (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), to derive a meaningful measure of Cognitive Distance – the degree to which two people differ in their opinions about the workings of the world. Next, I amend this measure to quantify the notion of Cognitive...

In this article I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may manipulate voting coalitions to their advantage by crafting different messages to target different winning coalitions. Furthermore, if...

We introduce the proto-entrepreneur as an economic agent who must first — i.e., before acting entrepreneurially — coordinate non-price information with others in order to reveal exploitable opportunities. Entrepreneurship, therefore, involves dual economic discovery problems, each of which...

Rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation across low and middle-income countries is leading to ever expanding numbers of urban poor, defined here as slum dwellers and the homeless. It is estimated that 828 million people are currently living in slum conditions. If governments, donors and NGOs are to...

Moore & Shannon's theorem is the cornerstone in reliability theory, but cannot be applied to human systems in its original form. A generalization to human systems would therefore be of considerable interest because the choice of organization structure can remedy reliability problems that...

There is broad, though not universal, agreement that widespread voter ignorance and irrational evaluation of evidence are serious threats to democracy. But there is deep disagreement over strategies for mitigating the danger. 'Top-down' approaches, such as epistocracy and lodging more authority...

We study the phenomenon of strategic polarization in group interactions. Agents with private preferences choose a public action (e.g., voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group outcome and...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to declare whether they hold standard-essential patents (SEPs) or disclose which SEPs they own, and to commit to licensing SEPs on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) terms. The apparent vagueness of FRAND...