The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions

A sketch of a game theoretic approach to the Theory of Money and Financial Institutions is presented in a nontechnical, nonmathematical manner. The detailed argument and specifics are presented in previous articles and in a forthcoming book.

Beyond foraging: behavioral science and the future of institutional economics

Institutions affect economic outcomes, but variation in them cannot be directly linked to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or technological availabilities. Game theoretic approaches, based as they typically are on foraging only assumptions, do not provide an adequate foundation for understanding the intervening role of politics and ideology; nor does the view that culture and institutions are entirely socially constructed. Understanding what institutions are and how they influence behavior requires an approach that is in part biological, focusing on cognitive and behavioral adaptations for social interaction favored in the past by group selection. These adaptations, along with their effects on canalizing social learning, help to explain uniformities in political and social order, and are the bedrock upon which we build cultural and institutional variability

Embedded, scattered, confused minds. What do hyper-conductive markets impose on investors’ social intelligence

This article discusses the observation theory developed by Elena Esposito, especially emphasising her critique of embeddedness. My understanding is that observation theory, if pushed to its limits, implies a never ending, infinite regression of meaning, cannot help to fully understand market behaviour. This is true for ‘scientific observers’ but also for ‘field observers’, e.g.., economic agents. Recent empirical findings indicate that the latter deal with (semantic, ontological and strategic) uncertainty, which is amplified by hyper-conductive, ICT-boosted, global markets, by drastically simplifying their strategies, adaptively segmenting and re-segmenting their epistemic, social “observation” space and creatively exploiting heuristics, emotions and social information. These findings seem to be more compatible with the idea of a continuous process of dis/re-embedding economic action. I argue that the involvement vs. detachment analogy formulated by Norbert Elias in his sociology of science studies could help us to develop an observation theory that does not merge individual and social dimensions and is more compatible with empirical evidence

The influencing effect of socialization agents on male children's sportswear choice decisions: a study of 8-11 year old male reactions to mother versus peers.

Academics, educationalists and parents have all expressed increasing concern about targeting and marketing towards children, particularly to those within the age group of eight to thirteen, and identified as tweenagers. Through an analysis of the literature it is established that inconsistencies exist on the influence of socialization agents on the reactions of young male consumers. Review of the literature also identifies that much is understood about female tweenagers but little is yet known about male tweenagers. The interpretive approach adopted explores the associations and reactions of male tweenagers to agents of consumer socialization, with a focus on mother versus peers. The study demonstrates how these agents affect the decisions of eight to eleven year old males, in the final years of the Scottish primary school system, within the sportswear sector. A two-stage research design combined a group based data procedure, supported by a projective comic strip scenario. Themes were identified from the analysis of friendship group discussions supported by the identification of phenomena emerging from projective data. An interpretivist epistemology supported an iterative, grounded process of data analysis, leading to the development of frameworks of consumer behaviour for male tweenagers within the product sector. The findings offer a different understanding from studies on female tweenagers in relation to parental involvement and influence, pester power and peer pressure. Four assertions emerged from the findings. Firstly, mum is identified as the gateway to brand information and in a positive attachment agent, evidenced through the exertion of positive reactions towards mum. Pester power was not in evidence, and instead supports the views on joint action between parent and child when participating in the consumer socialization game. Peer pressure is low, as these children demonstrate negative responses to peer socialization agents. And more importantly, these boys are identified as being different to girls in their socialization relationships. This thesis focuses on the voice of males tweenagers and reveals them to be embedded within social networks where they do not yet feel compelled to follow the directives of peers when making sportswear choices. The findings contribute to the literature by proposing that marketers and consumer researchers need to review the assumptions that what is known about children, and in particular girl tweenagers, can be transferred to male tweenagers. This exploratory study questions the usefulness of these assumptions as an appropriate basis for practitioner and researcher decisions, and underlines the need to study males tweenagers as a separate consumer social group

The virtues and vices of equilibrium and the future of financial economics

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then we present a critique and describe why this approach is inherently limited, and why economics needs to move in new directions if it is to continue to make progress. We stress that this shouldn't be a question of dogma, but should be resolved empirically. There are situations where equilibrium models provide useful predictions and there are situations where they can never provide useful predictions. There are also many situations where the jury is still out, i.e., where so far they fail to provide a good description of the world, but where proper extensions might change this. Our goal is to convince the skeptics that equilibrium models can be useful, but also to make traditional economists more aware of the limitations of equilibrium models. We sketch some alternative approaches and discuss why they should play an important role in future research in economics.Comment: 68 pages, one figur

The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences

Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Spatial interactions in agent-based modeling

Agent Based Modeling (ABM) has become a widespread approach to model complex interactions. In this chapter after briefly summarizing some features of ABM the different approaches in modeling spatial interactions are discussed. It is stressed that agents can interact either indirectly through a shared environment and/or directly with each other. In such an approach, higher-order variables such as commodity prices, population dynamics or even institutions, are not exogenously specified but instead are seen as the results of interactions. It is highlighted in the chapter that the understanding of patterns emerging from such spatial interaction between agents is a key problem as much as their description through analytical or simulation means. The chapter reviews different approaches for modeling agents' behavior, taking into account either explicit spatial (lattice based) structures or networks. Some emphasis is placed on recent ABM as applied to the description of the dynamics of the geographical distribution of economic activities, - out of equilibrium. The Eurace@Unibi Model, an agent-based macroeconomic model with spatial structure, is used to illustrate the potential of such an approach for spatial policy analysis.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, 105 references; a chapter prepared for the book "Complexity and Geographical Economics - Topics and Tools", P. Commendatore, S.S. Kayam and I. Kubin, Eds. (Springer, in press, 2014

Making American Foundations Relevant

The work and impact of foundations is not registering with critical audiences, according to philanthropy leaders and observers interviewed for this Philanthropy Awareness Initiative report. To find the solution, foundations need to look in the mirror, they argue, and make changes to their communications culture and practice

The Discovery, Use and Impact of Platinum Salts as Chemotherapy Agents for Cancer

Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.First published by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2007.©The Trustee of the Wellcome Trust, London, 2007. All volumes are freely available online at: www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/modbiomed/wellcome_witnesses/Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 4 April 2006. Introduction by Professor Matti Aapro, Grenolier, Switzerland.Proposed by Dr Mark Walport (Wellcome Trust) this Seminar examined the discovery, use and impact of platinum salts as chemotherapy agents for cancer. Organized with the assistance of Professor Paul Andrews (St George's Hospital Medical School) and Dr Tony Woods (Wellcome Trust) and chaired by Professor Sir Kenneth Calman (Durham) the Seminar discussed the serendipitous emergence of platinum salts as widely used anticancer agents from a chance observation in a microbiology laboratory; through their use especially for the treatment of previously untreatable solid tumours such as those of the testes and ovary; and their significance in the development of antiemetic agents for chemotherapy patients. Participants included chemists, oncologists, and academic and industrial pharmacologists who devised, in particular, the 5HT3 receptor antagonists. Participants included: Professor Kenneth Bagshawe, Dr Penelope Brock, Professor Hilary Calvert, Professor David Grahame-Smith, Professor Richard Gralla, Professor Kenneth Harrap, Dr James Hoeschele, Professor Ian Judson, Mr Wesley Miner, Professor Robert Naylor, Mrs Brenda Reynolds, Dr John Rudd, Dr Gareth Sanger, Dr David Tattersall, Professor Andrew Thomson, Professor Robert Williams and Dr Eve Wiltshaw. Christie D A, Tansey E M. (eds) (2007) The discovery, use and impact of platinum salts as chemotherapy agents for cancer, Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, vol. 30. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is a registered charity, no. 210183