This paper is an exploratory analysis of the role that banks play in supporting what Jevons called the mechanism of exchange. It considers a model economy in which exchange activities are facilitated and coordinated by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms. Collectively,...

This paper presents an agent based model of the evolution of cooperation in a complex environment. Anthropoid agents reproduce sexually, and live in a world where food is irregularly distributed in space and seasonally produced. They can share food, form hunting and migrating groups, and are...

We use an agent-based computational approach to show how inflation can worsen macroeconomic performance by disrupting the mechanism of exchange in a decentralized market economy. We find that, in our model economy, increasing the trend rate of inflation above 3 percent has a substantial...

There is a counterintuitive gap in the club theory of religion. While it elegantly accounts for the notable success of strict sectarian religious groups in recruiting members and maintaining commitment, it exhibits less satisfactory properties when used to account for groups requiring neither...

The worldwide interest in thermoelectric waste heat recovery is constantly growing, with a wide range of applications ranging from small harvesters integrated into wireless sensor networks all the way to larger harvesters such as the ones that can potentially be integrated into cars. The wide...