Drawing on a large database of publicly announced R&D alliances, we track the evolution of R&D networks in a large number of economic sectors over a long time period (1986-2009). Our main goal is to evaluate temporal and sectoral robustness of the main statistical properties of empirical R&D...

The authors develop an agent-based model to reproduce the size distribution of R&D alliances of firms. Agents are uniformly selected to initiate an alliance and to invite collaboration partners. These decide about acceptance based on an individual threshold that is compared with the utility...

A local culture denotes a set of rules on business behaviour among firms in a cluster. Similar to social norms or conventions, it is an emergent feature of interaction in an economic network. To model its emergence, we consider a distributed agent population, representing cluster firms. Further,...

No abstract received.

No abstract received.

We introduce a general framework for models of cascade and contagion processes on networks, to identify their commonalities and differences. In particular, models of social and financial cascades, as well as the fiber bundle model, the voter model, and models of epidemic spreading are recovered...

In this paper we focus on diversity-induced resonance, which was recently found in bistable, excitable and other physical systems. We study the appearance of this phenomenon in a purely economic model of cooperating and defecting agents. Agent's contribution to a public good is seen as a social...