Speech Development by Imitation

The Double Cone Model (DCM) is a model of how the brain transforms sensory input to motor commands through successive stages of data compression and expansion. We have tested a subset of the DCM on speech recognition, production and imitation. The experiments show that the DCM is a good candidate for an artificial speech processing system that can develop autonomously. We show that the DCM can learn a repertoire of speech sounds by listening to speech input. It is also able to link the individual elements of speech to sequences that can be recognized or reproduced, thus allowing the system to imitate spoken language

An Essay on the Emergence, Organization and Performance of Financial Markets: the case of the Alternative Investment Market

This work provides an overview of the historical evolution, the organizational forms, and the performances of the stock exchanges and market segments catering to small and growing companies, set up in Europe in the last thirty years. We mainly focus on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), created by the London Stock Exchange in 1995. This case study yields useful insights about the role of public and private interests in market emergence and in shaping market architectures, the costs and benefits of light stock market regulation, and the use of stock markets to support technology-based small firms. A review of the existing empirical evidence shows that dimensional growth of the AIM has been fueled by companies characterized by low values of long-term returns, growth rates, R&D productivity and solvency.Public equity, Market emergence, Market design, Alternative Investment Market, High-tech, Small firms

Explaining Party Emergence in Swedish Local Politics 1973–2002

Since individuals demanding formations of new parties face a collective action problem, I inquire why people form new parties, and why this political strategy became increasingly popular between 1973 and 2002 in Swedish municipalities. Case-studies indicate that ‘strong emotions’ – i.e. anger, frustration and indignation – mobilize rational actors to start up new parties. However, ‘strong emotions’ only explain why individuals form parties in the first place, not why party formation has become a popular strategy. Hence, I hypothesize that entrepreneurs forming parties at t inspire potential entrepreneurs in neighbouring municipalities at t + 1. Since previous attempts to explain the increasing number of new parties in Sweden have failed, I maintain that the support the hypothesis gains adds important knowledge to this field.Party entrepreneurs; new parties; emotional arousal; rational imitation; local politics; Sweden

The self-organization of combinatoriality and phonotactics in vocalization systems

This paper shows how a society of agents can self-organize a shared vocalization system that is discrete, combinatorial and has a form of primitive phonotactics, starting from holistic inarticulate vocalizations. The originality of the system is that: (1) it does not include any explicit pressure for communication; (2) agents do not possess capabilities of coordinated interactions, in particular they do not play language games; (3) agents possess no specific linguistic capacities; and (4) initially there exists no convention that agents can use. As a consequence, the system shows how a primitive speech code may bootstrap in the absence of a communication system between agents, i.e. before the appearance of language

Innovation creation and diffusion in a social network: an agent based approach

Market is not only the result of the behaviour of agents, as we can find other forms of contact and communication. Many of them are determined by proximity conditions in some kind of space: in this paper we pay a particular attention to relational space, that is the space determined by the relationships between individuals. The paper starts from a brief account on theoretical and empirical literature on social networks. Social networks represent people and their relationships as networks, in which individuals are nodes and the relationships between them are ties. In particular, graph theory is used in literature in order to demonstrate some properties of social networks summarised in the concept of Small Worlds. The concept may be used to explain how some phenomena involving relations among agents have effects on multiple different geographical scales, involving both the local and the global scale. The empirical section of the paper is introduced by a brief summary of simulation techniques in social science and economics as a way to investigate complexity. The model investigates the dynamics of a population of firms (potential innovators) and consumers interacting in a space defined as a social network. Consumers are represented in the model in order to create a competitive environment pushing enterprises into innovative process (we refer to Schumpeter’s definition): from interaction between consumers and firms innovation emerges as a relational good.Innovation; small world; computational economics; network; complexity

New firm performance and territorial driving forces

The article analyses recent approaches on entry and post-entry performance by new firms, with particular focus on its applicability to small manufacturing firms recently borned in Argentina. The analysis is based on a sample of small firms created in the period 1990-2000 in three intermediate cities in Buenos Aires province (Argentina) in manufacturing sector. The survey collected data about microeconomic and mesoeconomic elements influencing firm performance. Results indicate that tradability is a key factor influencing firm performance. New firms entering markets where the spatial markets are reduced face limited perspectives on expansion. In turn, tradability is also affected by entrepeneurial motivation and, especially in underveloped regions, macroeconomic variables.new firms, post-entry performance, transability