Organized crime satisfies a demand for necessary social services in the absence of effective government institutions. This paper examines the rise of the Sicilian mafia. Using system dynamics, we model this system and test various policies to determine what factors have the greatest impact on...

Systems thinking skills have been recognized as part of the core science literacy, and more recently, as critical 21st century skills. While several studies have investigated how games can be used to facilitate students' systems thinking skills, little is known about how teachers can design...

This paper utilizes the dynastic cycle framework proposed in (K. Saeed & Pavlov, 2008) to explain the role of dissent in universities. By combining the dissent expression framework (Kassing, 2011) and the dynastic cycle structure, we construct a generic model for dissent in organizations. The...

The approaching decline in the U.S. college-age population, sometimes referred to as a “demographic storm,” has been identified as an existential threat to the future of American colleges and universities. This article conducts a model-driven analysis of three plausible college-level...

The growth of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) imposes increasing costs on organizations and causes considerable aggravation on the part of e-mail recipients. A thriving anti-spam industry addresses some of the frustration. Regulation and various economic and technical means are in the works....

In this chapter, I used the strategy dynamics methodology, which is a combination of the resource-based theory and system dynamics, to explain the sustained ability of two online channels to deliver economic value to its users. I posed that since spam and file-sharing applications are acutely...

A literacy-targeted approach to economic instruction draws on insights from cognitive science. It highlights that students process complex economic information by constructing and modifying schemas that represent economic material. Following this approach, we developed a set of instructional...

Our purpose here is to describe and illustrate in the simplest possible way a multiple-phase theory of economic growth and development that helps explain why human evolution has not been characterized by steady progress but by fluctuating growth and changing forms, sometimes progressing to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on higher education. Steering academic institutions through the pandemic is a complex and multifaceted task that can be supported with model-based scenario analysis. This article studies the short-term and long-term effects of the pandemic on...

Organized crime satisfies the demand for protection and enforcement of property rights in the absence of effective government institutions. However, weak law enforcement alone cannot explain the cross-regional differences in mafia activity. This chapter develops a feedback model of economic...