When companies purchase IT products for their employees, departments or divisions, whether to standardize on one product or to allow the users to make their own choices is an important decision for IT managers to make. By consolidating demand and committing to buy from a single seller,...

What are the welfare effects of the information contained in macroeconomic statistics, central-bank communications, or news in the media? We address this question in a business-cycle framework that nests the neoclassical core of modern DSGE models. Earlier lessons that were based on “beauty...

[Note: the substantially revised published version of this article is available at www.ssrn.com/absract=489762] This article questions whether copyright law's prohibition against unauthorized copying and sales is either necessary or beneficial to the production and dissemination of creative...

The paper presents a simulation of the dynamics of impersonal trust. It shows how a 'trust/reciprocation' norm can emerge and stabilize in populations of conditional cooperators. The norm, or behavioral regularity, is not to be identified with a single strategy. It is instead supported by...

This paper develops a simple model to examine the interaction between partner choice and individual behavior in games of coordination. An important ingredient of our approach is the way we model partner choice: We suppose that a player can establish ties with other players by unilaterally...

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

Economies are complicated systems encompassing micro behaviors, interaction patterns, and global regularities. Whether partial or general in scope, studies of economic systems must consider how to handle difficult real-world aspects such as asymmetric information, imperfect competition,...

[Note: the substantially revised published version was posted here on Aug. 4, 2004] This Article explores how copyright law's prohibition against unauthorized copying and sales may, counter to the law's purported goal, have an overall negative impact on the production and dissemination of...

When actions by one agent force another to deviate from their agreements with a third, “victim” turns into “injurer” in the chain’s subsequent steps. Should the chain’s initiator be responsible only for the direct harm they cause or also bear some of the indirect losses they trigger?...