Biological Communities as Economic Subjects

Optimum design of electronic communities as economic entities

Electronic communities can be designed to organize consumers, to pool their purchasing power, and to guide their purchasing decisions. Such commercial electronic communities have the potential to facilitate the creation of novel marketplaces, and even radically change the buyerseller interaction, as physical communities did throughout the history. Commercial electronic communities are groups of...

Biological communities as interacting compartments: thermodynamic properties and diversity indices

Diversity indices provide simple and powerful metrics for assessing biological communities. Based on entropy measures, the approach considers statistical and thermodynamic inferences to deduce ecological patterns. However, concerns exist regarding the accuracy of diversity indices. Because relative quantities depend on the sorting of organisms (e.g., guilds and species) and their interactions, ...

Distributed communities and nodal subjects

Drawing upon cognitive science and systems theory, this article examines a number of issues commonly undertaken in theorizing ‘online communities.’ The thesis is that current approaches to online community that focus on specific online ‘places,’ such as LamdaMOO, may overlook the actual practices engaged in by current internet users, which focus on ad-hoc interactions with a distributed communi...

Studying R-3 Communities: An Economic Lens

Rural, regional and remote (R-3) communities are generally in decline in Australia and in some other countries in the Western world. The economic problems include a decline in agriculture as competitive countries protect their domestic industry by subsidies and high tariffs. This paper examines the economic situation of these communities on four levels. These are the policy level (the Australia...

Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities