Many human cultures engage in the collective commemoration of dead members of their community. Ancestor veneration and other forms of commemoration may help to reduce social distance within groups, thereby encouraging reciprocity and providing a significant survival advantage. Here we present a...

Investors in mutual funds appear to reward disproportionately the best performing funds with large inflows while, at the same time, avoid to withdraw similar amounts from the poorly managed funds. We show that this peculiar flat-convex shape of the flow-performance curve for mutual funds can be...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an intuitive explanation of the emergence and evolution of the week based on a historical precedent draw from ancient Egypt. In this paper, we view the week as a coordinating social institution that was created to resolve a fundamental problem of society -...

A model is developed to study the effectiveness of innovation and its impact on structure creation on agent-based societies. The abstract model that is developed is easily adapted to any particular field. In an interacting environment, the agents receive something from the environment (the other...

Different approaches to project planning and scheduling have been developed. The Operational Research (OR) approach provides two major planning techniques: CPM and PERT. Artificial Intelligence (AI) initially promoted the automatic planner concept. In order to plan a project, the automatic...

In this paper, we adopt an agent-based approach to model collective market dynamics when interactions between the agents in a market are significant. Our model has two special features. First, social groups are formed in a random cluster process which, we believe, mimics the actual formation of...

Agent-based modelling and numerical simulations are means that facilitate exploring the structural and dynamic characteristics of systems which may prove intractable with analytical methods. This contribution examines the issues related to them with a particular attention to their use in the...