A central difficulty in economics is to create a model economy that has both good business cycle properties and good asset pricing properties. Macro models have the former, fail in the latter. Finance models typically work with endowment economies, and are hard to integrate with macro. I show how to solve this difficulty by a simple, portable, modelling device, the “disasterization” procedure. ...

This paper analyzes students’ experience with Cogent, a virtual economy system used throughout the 4 years of a B.S. degree in a Technology major. The case study explains the rules of the Cogent system and investigates its effectiveness to motivate students to learn. Using focus groups and interviews, we collected qualitative data from students about their experience and perceptions of Cogent. ...

Today’s peer-to-peer networks are designed based on the assumption that the participating nodes are cooperative, which does not hold in reality. Incentive mechanisms that promote cooperation must be introduced. However, the existing incentive schemes (using either reputation or virtual currency) suffer from various attacks based on false reports. Even worse, a colluding group of malicious nodes...

We introduce the results of a non-parametric estimate of the wage-Phillips Curve into a simplified version of the model by Flaschel and Krolzig (2006). The resulting non-linearity in the wage inflation-employment relation translates into a non-linearity in the reduced form of the model, namely the wage-price spiral. A dynamical analysis is then provided, both in wage-led and profit-led effectiv...

Six pigeons were studied in a token economy in which tokens could be produced and exchanged for food on one side of an experimental chamber and for water on the opposite side of the chamber. Responses on one key produced tokens according to a token-production fixed ratio (FR) schedule. Responses on a second key produced an exchange period during which tokens were exchanged for water or food. In...

“Strategy-proofness” is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of “group strategy-proofness” is also often employed to obtain clear characterization results of social choice rules. Gro...

We empirically investigate how hosts on Airbnb, a popular peer-to-peer website for fee-based sharing of under-utilized space, adjust their prices once their offering gets a visible star rating for the first time. We use data for over 14,000 offerings from Airbnb which we collected for New York City. Our findings indicate that hosts whose offerings achieve star rating visibility significantly in...

Introduction What is new about new media? Its development and use is more influenced by economic factors than the old media. And the new media is more central to the new economy. Indeed, an ever more popular theme in the scientific literature, government policy documents and the popular press, is that technologically advanced economies are in the process of moving beyond industrial capitalism t...

1 Computational Transport Phenomena Laboratory (CTPL), Division of Physical Sciences and Engineering (PSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0975, USA 3 Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4...