We consider general economies in which rational agents interact locally. The local aspect of the interactions is designed to capture in a simple abstract way social interactions, that is, socio-economic environments in which markets do not mediate all of agents’ choices, and each agent’s choice might be in part determined, for instance, by family, peer group, or ethnic group effects. We study s...

We compare the simple online economic interactions between a human and a multimodal communication agent (virtual human) to the findings of similar simple interactions with other humans and those that were run in the laboratory. We developed protocols and dialogue capabilities to support the multi modal agent in playing two well-studied economic games (Ultimatum Game, Dictator Game). We analyze ...

Models of the interactions between population, economy, and environment often contain nonlinear functional relationships and variables that vary a t different speeds. These properties foster apparent unpredictabilities in system behavior. Using a simple deterministic model of demographic, economic and environmental interactions, we illustrate the usefulness of geometric singular perturbation th...

Plant-pathogen interactions are an important knowledge domain within plant biotechnology, both scientifically and in economic terms. Unlike other knowledge domains within life sciences, however, semantic technologies have not been used extensively to codify it, therefore, there is a lack of axiomatic models amenable to automated integration and inference. We present the Plant-Pathogen Interacti...

Although it is well known and identified that drug-drug interactions exist, the recognition of importance of food and drug interactions to practice has been growing much slower. On the other hand, drug-food/nutrient interactions continue to grow with the common use of medications. Beside the awareness of this type of interactions, food-drug interaction studies are critical to evaluate appropria...

Socio-economic networks are of central importance in economic life. We develop a method of identifying and studying motifs in socio-economic networks by focusing on “dynamic motifs,” i.e., evolutionary connection patterns that, because of “node acquaintances” in the network, occur much more frequently than random patterns. We examine two evolving bi-partite networks: i) the world-wide commercia...

Abstract. We model costly interactions (contracts) between managers and investors. We suggest that globalization of production and favorable technology shock of the 1990s altered economic environment of managerinvestor interactions. These changes exacerbate agency conflict due to the increased managerial gains from ex post reneging, and, simultaneously, decreased costs of managerial reneging. I...