Strategic decision-making in multi-agent markets: The emergence of endogenous crises and volatility

Traditional economic frameworks are built upon perfectly rational agents and equilibrium outcomes. However, during times of crises, these frameworks prove insufficient. In this thesis, we take an alternative perspective based on "Complexity Economics", relaxing the assumption of perfectly rational agents and allowing for out-of-equilibrium dynamics. While many contemporary approaches explain crises and non-equilibrium market phenomena as the rational reaction to external news, the emergence of endogenous crises remains an open question. We begin addressing this question by demonstrating how a multi-agent model of heterogeneous boundedly rational agents acting according to heuristics can reproduce and forecast key non-linear price movements in the Australian housing market, during boom and bust cycles. In order to provide foundations for such heuristic-based reasoning, we then propose a novel information-theoretic approach, Quantal Hierarchy, for modelling limitations in strategic reasoning, demonstrating how this convincingly and generically captures the decision-making of interacting agents in competitive markets outperforming existing approaches. In addition, we demonstrate how a concise generalised market model can generate important stylised facts, such as fat-tails and volatility clustering, and allow for the emergence of crises, purely endogenously. This thesis provides support to the interacting agent hypothesis, addressing a crucial question of whether crisis emergence and various stylised facts can be seen as endogenous phenomena, and provides a generic method for representing strategic agent reasoning

The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being: Estimates for Canada, 1999 and 2005

This report presents estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for a representative sample of Canadian households in 1999 and 2005. The results indicate that there was only modest growth in the average Canadian household’s total command over economic resources in the six years between 1999 and 2005. Although inequality in economic well-being increased slightly over the 1999-2005 period, the LIMEW was more equally distributed across Canadian households than more common income measures (such as after-tax income) in both 1999 and 2005. The median household’s economic well-being was lower in Canada than in the United States in both years.LIMEW, well-being, income, earnings, wealth, public consumption, government expenditure, household production, inequality

"The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being: Estimates for Canada, 1999 and 2005"

This report presents estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for a representative sample of Canadian households in 1999 and 2005. The results indicate that there was only modest growth in the average Canadian household’s total command over economic resources in the six years between 1999 and 2005. Although inequality in economic well-being increased slightly over the 1999–2005 period, the LIMEW was more equally distributed across Canadian households than more common income measures (such as after-tax income) in both 1999 and 2005. The median household’s economic well-being was lower in Canada than in the United States in both years.Well-being, Inequality, Income, Wealth, Government Expenditure, Household Production, LIMEW, (Canada)

Beyond Transhumanism: The Dangers of Transhumanist Philosophies on Human and Nonhuman Beings

Each chapter that follows centers on literature showing the possible effects of Transhumanist philosophies if they are implemented. I focus on contemporary fiction that portrays Transhumanists — humans who believe in Transhumanism — as well as post-/transhumans characters. Limiting the scope of my thesis to contemporary literary works, I aim to explore the potential of new (specifically genetic) technologies, and consider the power of speculative fiction as it impinges both who we are and who or who we might become. In Chapter 1, I analyze the ambiguities of language in the Transhuman Declaration (2009), a manifesto written by a group of Transhumanists called Humanity Plus (H+). In this chapter, I show how the language used invites radical, dangerous, and totalitarian ideologies to sprout in Transhumanism, and in turn examine Zoltan Istvan’s philosophical novel The Transhumanist Wager (2011), which shows a radical Transhumanist building a One World Order to “perfect” the human species. The Transhumanist Declaration is the only nonfiction text I analyze in this thesis, and I chose it because it was one of the first, and is certainly the most popular, statement from a collective of Transhumanist thinkers. It changed the movement from a purely academic one to a political one. In Chapter 2, I show Transhumanity’s effects on post-/transhuman beings created by the members of the movement, by I analyzing Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in order to show that Transhumanism may create marvels, but it will also create slaves. This chapter inspects the lives of Atwood’s genetically-manipulated Crakers and Bacigalupi’s Emiko, an engineered transhuman sex slave, and examines how post-/transhuman beings are deprived of agency in an anthropocentric world. This chapter also focuses on the issue of the human as an ascendant being and how that view shapes the world we inhabit and will necessarily affect post-/transhuman beings physically and emotionally. In Chapter 3, I look at texts that grant Transhumanism’s ultimate wish — immortality — and analyze how immorality, or the lack of death, affects human society through David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) and Jose Saramago’s Death With Interruptions (2008). These novels argue that immortality is not the answer to humanity’s deeply instantiated problems, and the absence of death will actually create more divisions in society, ultimately leading to violent conflict

Understanding cell source and extracellular matrix contributions to cartilage and bone repair for regenerative medicine applications

Human skeletal elements are grossly divided into three main tissue categories: bone, cartilage and muscle. While skeletal muscle is closely associated and interacts with the bony element, this thesis focuses specifically on the repair mechanisms involved in bone and cartilage and how to better mediate these mechanisms from a regenerative medicine perspective; muscle will not be treated hereafter and any reference to skeletal tissue refers either to bone or cartilage. To begin, I will first define key concepts in skeletal tissue repair that give background to the regenerative strategies chosen during this thesis. Following this, I will introduce the concept of tissue engineering and the parameters that are necessary to take into account when preparing a living tissue graft. After this brief introduction, I will present the experimental work performed during this thesis in which the specific strategies employed towards skeletal tissue engineering are presented. Finally, I conclude with a summary of accomplishments and suggest further work that could be performed to help advance the presented topics towards a translational technology

Reading Romans in Rome: A Reception of Romans in the Roman Context of Ethnicity and Faith

Abstract This thesis primarily addresses one question: “To what extent can Romans be heard and understood by a readership in Rome within its religio-economic, socio-political, and ethnic context, especially by non-Judeans?” To address this question, certain presuppositions regarding the audience are re-examined. This first is how the epistle’s audience, as residents of Rome, may have understood their ethnic identity, and how they constructed and negotiated that identity as Greeks, Romans, and Judeans. Chapter 1 focuses on this question for Greek and Roman identity formation and negotiation, since both groups are integral to reading Romans in Rome. The chapter concludes that Hellenization and Romanization were simultaneously shaping life in Rome prior to and during the time the initial hearers interacted with the Roman epistle. The second chapter concurrently tests two presuppositions. The first is whether Judean treatment in Rome was any different from the experience of any other ethnic minority – whether Rome was anti-Semitic. This is tested by developing a comparative review of Judean life in relation to contemporaneous Egyptian treatment in Rome, in conjunction with Appendices 2 and 3. The second presupposition tested in this chapter is a tangent of the first – that is whether Wiefel’s hypothesis is a valid foundation for assumptions regarding the audience experience in Rome, prior to and at the time of the epistle’s reception. The chapter concludes that Judean and Egyptian ethnicities were in competition in Rome, and based upon ongoing change in circumstances experienced a range of acceptance and rejection. It also concludes that Wiefel’s hypothesis – the eviction in 49 CE of all Judeans and Judean Christ-followers from Rome – does not reflect the reality of the Judean situation. Chapter 3 tests the presupposition, that the epistle received in Rome was interpreted by listeners primarily through an oft-assumed Judean lens – that of Judean tradition and the LXX. The chapter reexamines a sample of key ethnic semantics of the epistle – the interaction of honor, faith, piety, and righteousness in Rome’s way of life. It concludes that honor was a key driver in the Roman socio-cultural experience. Faith-making and faith-keeping were integral frameworks for human and divine relationships, and piety and righteousness were enmeshed in faith and faithfulness in the Roman way of life as the foundation of right relationship between humanity and deity. Chapter 4 integrates these ideas in reinterpretation of Romans as an audience recipient, by “sitting in the audience,” primarily as a non-Judean listener. It follows the flow of the discourse, noting the ethnic interplay, and the use of honor, faith, and righteousness as key Roman language to engage in ethnic reconstruction. This re-hearing of the sampled terms in Romans 1:1-17 is only an example of future work to examine extended readings of Romans in Rome, re-viewing the text through a Romanized lens