There is considerable scope for further privatisation, with the particular aim of sharply reducing public sector claims on national output. However, survey evidence indicates considerable opposition to further privatisations, particularly those taking the form of creating dividend-paying joint...

By scientific standards, the accuracy of short-term economic forecasts has been poor, and shows no sign of improving over time. We form a delay matrix of time-series data on the overall rate of growth of the economy, with lags spanning the period over which any regularity of behaviour is...

We provide empirical evidence that in a social network which evolves over time, it is possible to extract deep information about the system from limited observations. In this paper, we consider a simple piece of readily available evidence on access to financial services by individuals in the UK....

Qualitative evidence suggests that heresy within the medieval Church had many of the characteristics of a scale-free network. From the perspective of the Church, heresy can be seen as an infectious disease. The disease persisted for long periods of time, breaking out again even when the Church...

The Internet is known to have had a powerful impact on on-line retailer strategies in markets characterised by long-tail distribution of sales [C. Anderson, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, New York, 2006]. Such retailers can exploit the long tail of the...

Almost one in ten adults in Britain do not use mainstream financial services. Most of them are not in paid employment. However, most people without paid work have accounts. Two hypotheses have been put forward: (i) reluctance by financial institutions to serve low-income customers; and (ii)...

Traditional accounts of innovation have tended to neglect the need for change to take place at particular times and in particular places. This paper considers how to move towards a description of innovative processes that take time and place into account. In particular, it looks at the role that...

In situations of what we now describe as radical uncertainty, the core model of agent behaviour, of rational autonomous agents with stable preferences, is not useful. Instead, a different principle, in which the decisions of an agent are based directly on the decisions and strategies of other...

In situations of what we now describe as radical uncertainty, the core model of agent behaviour, of rational autonomous agents with stable preferences, is not useful. Instead, a different principle, in which the decisions of an agent are based directly on the decisions and strategies of other...