Hayek's well-known evolutionary concept of "competition as a discovery procedure" can be characterized as a parallel process of experimentation, in which rivalrous firms generate and test hypotheses about the best way to fulfill the consumers' preferences. Through this permanent process of...

In this paper, we compare the computational and sociological study of norms, and resimulate previous simulations (Conte and Castelfranchi 1995a, Castelfranchi, Conte and Paolucci 1998) under slightly different conditions. First, we analyze the relation between norms, social inequality and...