Since its introduction in 2000, the Sznajd model has been assumed to simulate a democratic community with two parties. The main flaw in this model is that a Sznajd system freezes in the long term in a non-democratic state, which can be either a dictatorship or a stalemate configuration. Here we...

Simulated Annealing has become a standard optimization technique for a wide variety of problems: starting at a random configuration and performing a sequence of moves, the system is optimized using a control parameter which partially allows for accepting a deterioration and therefore for...

For many years, the problem of how to distribute students to the various universities in Germany according to the preferences of the students has remained unsolved. Various approaches, like the centralized method to let a central agency organize the distribution to the various universities or...

Search space smoothing and related heuristic optimization algorithms provide an alternative approach to simulated annealing and its variants: while simulated annealing traverses barriers in the energy landscape at finite temperatures, search space smoothing intends to remove these barriers, so...

Envy is a rather complex and irrational emotion. In general, it is very difficult to obtain a measure of this feeling, but in an economical context envy becomes an observable which can be measured. When various individuals compare their possessions, envy arises due to the inequality of their...

Envy is a rather complex and irrational emotion. In general, it is very difficult to obtain a measure of this feeling, but in an economical context envy becomes an observable which can be measured. When various individuals compare their possessions, envy arises due to the inequality of their...

Some years ago, Bachem, Hochstättler, and Malich proposed a heuristic algorithm called Simulated Trading for the optimization of vehicle routing problems. Computational agents place buy-orders and sell-orders for customers to be handled at a virtual financial market, the prices of the orders...