There are many signs indicating that something new has happened in the United States economy during the last decade. While the surge in labor and total factor productivity growth rates in the latter half of the 1990s was impressive and widely interpreted as a sign of a ‘New Economy,’ it remains to be seen whether it was a fleeting phenomenon or the beginning of a new trend. But there are other ...

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...

Digitization and new trends in consumption behaviour have brought forward new business models within the Sharing Economy (SE). While commercial online sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have already received some attention by researchers, non-commercial online platforms have remained largely unexplored. At the same time, prosocial motives are playing an increasingly central role in parti...

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...