A recent nationwide survey estimated that approximately 20 million households in the United States use wood as a source of heating fuel and that about 30 percent of those use wood as their primary source of space heat.' In two studies of total wood energy consumption, the U.S. Department of...

Pragmatic decision makers adjust their view and their decisions to the state of the world. Ideological decision makers follow a guiding principle making decisions that do not change with circumstances. Either philosophy can be successful. This study explores a group of virtual agents, some of...

Labor PACs are used to explore the potential congressional influence of campaign contributions from special interest groups. PACs of organized labor are particularly useful for two reasons. First, a set of labor issues are defined each year by the AFL-CIO and so ad-hoc decisions about pertinent...

Consider a group of agents embedded in a network, repeatedly playing a game with their neighbors. Each agent acts locally but through the links of the network local decisions percolate to the entire population. Past research shows that such a system converges either to an absorbing state (a...

Consider autonomous agents endowed with two goods and the capability of producing each. Regularly each agent can produce one (only) of the goods or trade with other agents. Each good yields utility according to a utility function. This paper studies how utility-maximizing agents optimize in...