The relation between Thermodynamics and Economics is a paramount issue in Ecological Economics. Two different levels can be distinguished when discussing it: formal and substantive. At the formal level, a mathematical framework is used to describe both thermodynamic and economic systems. At the substantive level, thermodynamic laws are applied to economic processes. In Ecological Economics, the...

This paper 1 presents the thesis that insecurity of software is due to interaction of technological and legal shortcomings, fostered by economic rationality. Ineffective liability laws further the distribution of unreliable and insecure software. Copyright protection for software hinders the quality improvement. Patent protection encourages the use of proprietary instead of standard technology....

Power laws are found in a wide range of diierent systems: from sand piles to word occurrence frequencies and to the size distribution of cities. The natural emergence of these power laws in so many diierent systems, which has been called self organized criticality, seems rather mysterious and awaits a rigorous explanation. In this letter we study the stationary regime of a previously introduced...

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this decline, many of these arguments are confounded by changes in the supply of technologies to control fertility. I exploit the introduction of state laws governing American women’s access to abortion to measure the effect of changes in the supply of f...

The prevalence of new cases of diabetes continues to increase, and the health burden for those with diabetes remains high. This is attributable, in part, to low adoption of evidence-based interventions for diabetes prevention and control. Law is a critical tool for health improvement, yet assessments reported in this paper indicate that federal, state, and local laws give only partial support t...

Modern economic theories of value derive from expected utility theory. Behavioral evidence points strongly toward departures from linear value weighting, which has given rise to alternative formulations that include prospect theory and rank-dependent utility theory. Many of the nonlinear forms for value assumed by these theories can be derived from the assumption that value is signaled by neuro...

As business rules are very common in business information systems, it is fundamental to analyze geographic rules in order to include them into geographic knowledge systems. The goal of this paper is, starting from examples taken overall from urban and environmental planning, to examine geographic rule semantics, and in particular to model space by combining logic and computational geometry. The...

Random matching is often used in economic models as a means of introducing uncertainty in sequential decision problems. We show that random matching processes that satisfy standard proportionality laws are not unique. We give conditions on the payo¤s and transitions functions of sequential decision models that insure that the models are robust to the non-uniqueness of the matching process. Unde...

Short abstract This paper in short1 presents the thesis that insecurity of software is due to interaction of technological and legal shortcomings, fostered by economic rationality. Ineffective liability laws further the distribution of unreliable and insecure software. Copyright protection for software hinders the quality improvement. Patent protection encourages the use of proprietary instead ...