Even in a modern economy, a large fraction of trades are not instantaneous one-shot deals. Some trades are packaged in streams, and others are executed over a period of time. Illustrative examples include construction projects, ongoing parts supply, and employment relationships. The passage of time creates a possible demand for adjustments, as the arrival of new information makes it desirable t...

Altruism and Envy in Contests: An Evolutionarily Stable Symbiosis

This is the story of how a conventional middle-class American household?a surgeon, his wife and three normal children?had first to recognise, then to cope with and, finally, to exclude, an abnormal family member. Tony was a beautiful child, the eldest, and apart from long hours of screaming for no apparent reason, he seemed a normal baby. His intellectual and motor development was average, but ...

The notion of complexity in physics comes from considering the perfect crystal and the isolated ideal gas as examples of simple models, and therefore as systems with zero complexity. The asymptotic properties that an indicator of complexity should have are induced from the characteristics of the two former systems. We have proposed in [López-Ruiz et al., 1995; Calbet & López-Ruiz, 2001] a simpl...