A review essay on Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, xx+503.

The DARPA Grand Challenge in which the Cornell Racing Team participates requires the completion of a Simulator, which purports all errors in the artificial intelligence path planning down below and back up. The simulator comes as the last layer in the top down approach followed by the Cornell...

90 Classical problems in economics are concerned with the solutions of several simultaneous nonlinear optimization problems, one for each consumer or producer, all facing constraints posed by the scarcity of resources. Often their interests conflict, and it is generally impossible to find a...

"Written with the attempt to tell credible history and possible scenes, in order to anticipate still latent tendencies, or in order to imagine communities and societies more civil, richer than reciprocity, in all its shapes. " (p. xv). From this ambitious premised the author of the issue takes...

This paper shows that best-price guarantees can enhance welfare, in contrast to findings in recent literature. While a high-quality monopolist can signal its quality strictly through high prices, using both price and a best-price guarantee may allow the firm to signal its quality with a smaller...

In Part I we provide a heuristic discussion of the motivation for the investigation of games of status. Here we confine our remarks to several alternative formulations of games of status and to exploring the relationship between these games and the class of simple games, in part using the...

We use game theory and the Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market, an agent-based model of an evolving stock market, to study the properties of strategic Nash equilibria in financial markets. We discover two things: there is a unique strategic equilibrium in the market, and this equilibrium in...