Systems thinking skills required to understand complex systems have been emphasized in education as a core aspect of science literacy, and more recently, as a critical 21st century skill. Although several studies have investigated how games can be used to facilitate students' systems thinking...

This article suggests that important trends in education can be understood if we view and study universities as complex systems that provide educational services. Methodologically, we draw on the service science theoretical framework, which we adapt to education, and then supplement our analysis...

The purpose of this paper is to report on the administered pricing subsector of a Post Keynesian-institutionalist-system dynamics (PKI-SD) "core" model that is currently under development by the authors. When complete, the model will be used to examine the dynamics of heterodox economic theory...

We develop a system dynamics model of message-based communication, where the information-processing capacity of message recipients is limited. Profit-seeking broadcasters send messages, but only some of these messages are valuable to recipients. Recipients cannot determine whether or not a...

Email marketing is a legitimate, lucrative, and widely used business tool, but it is in danger of being overrun by unwanted commercial email (also known as spam). Conventional approaches to maintaining the robustness of legitimate email attack pieces of the problem. In contrast, this article...

As filters improve, the information assets of spammers become more valuable and lead to more, not less, overall spamming activity. This is troubling to contemplate, because it means no amount of spending on better filters will be enough. The next levels of escalation might then involve...

Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) is a significant problem of the digital commons, but there has been little empirical analysis of proposed solutions and underlying mechanisms. This study, based on an analysis of 47 million inbound e-mail messages drawn from a cross-section of e-mail inbox...

The phenomenon of unwanted commercial messages (UCM), including e-mail spam and emerging forms that target other Internet communications facilities, is analyzed from an information-economics perspective. UCM traffic pays off for its senders when it is noticed and consumed by Internet users; the...

This article analyzes the long-term financial sustainability of small tuition-based colleges in the context of rapid and accelerating transformation caused by demographic changes in the undergraduate student market

Educational programs leading to degrees in system dynamics are rare and thus of critical importance to the future of the field of system dynamics. However, to a large extent such programs have not yet been made transparent to the system dynamics community as a whole. The present article...