To maintain stability yet retain the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, social systems must strike a balance between the maintenance of a shared reality and the survival of minority opinion. A computational model is presented that investigates the interplay of two basic,...

Computer simulations, one of the most powerful tools of science, have many uses. This paper concentrates on the benefits to the social science researcher. Based on our, somewhat paradoxical experiences we had when working with computer simulations, we argue that the main benefit for the...

A class of stochastic games with additive reward and transition structure is studied. For zero-sum games under some ergodicity assumptions 1-equilibria are shown to exist. They correspond to so-called sensitive optimal policies in dynamic programming. For a class of nonzero-sum stochastic games...

The family of weighted Banzhaf values for cooperativen-person TU-games is studied. First we introduce the weighted Banzhaf value for an exogenously given vector of positive weights of the players. Then we give an axiomatic characterization of the class of all possible weighted Banzhaf values....

A class of stochastic games with additive reward and transition structure is studied. For zero-sum games under some ergodicity assumptions 1-equilibria are shown to exist. They correspond to so-called sensitive optimal policies in dynamic programming. For a class of nonzero-sum stochastic games...

In this paper we show that many results on equilibria in stochastic games arising from economic theory can be deduced from the theorem on the existence of a correlated equilibrium due to Nowak and Raghavan. Some new classes of nonzero-sum Borel state space discounted stochastic games having...

The model of dynamic social influence is used to describe the coordination of individual economic decisions. Computer simulations of the model show that the social and economic transitions occur as growing clusters of “new” in the sea of old. The model formulated at the individual level may...

The speed of social and technological changes is constantly increasing. Change is a pre-requisite for economic development but this increasing speed carries additional costs that may largely affect the ability of the social systems to adopt them. While the financial costs constitute a limit to...

Proving the existence of speculative financial bubbles even a posteriori has proven exceedingly difficult so anticipating a speculative bubble ex ante would at first seem an impossible task. Still as illustrated by the recent turmoil in financial markets initiated by the so called subprime...