SFI Working Papers contain accounts of scienti5ic work of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Santa Fe Institute. We accept papers intended for publication in peer-reviewed journals or proceedings volumes, but not papers that have already appeared in print. Except for papers by our external faculty, papers must be based on work done at SFI, inspired by an invited vis...

We develop a patent analysis approach to discover types of IT innovations and examine their technological and economic impacts. Our empirical investigation is based on 73,120 patents in the medical devices industry filed between 1996 and 2005. Rather than relying on pre-established classifications of IT innovations, we apply textual analysis to patent abstracts and map the extracted IT innovati...

That past patterns may continue in many different ways has long been identified as a problem for accounts of induction. The novelty of Goodman’s ‘‘new riddle of induction’’ lies in a meta-argument that purports to show that no account of induction can discriminate between incompatible continuations. That metaargument depends on the perfect symmetry of the definitions of grue/bleen and green/blu...

goal words (e.g., ‘‘equality,’’ ‘‘thin’’) significantly predicted their success at pursuing those goals, and sometimes did so above and beyond participants’ explicit (i.e., intentional, conscious) ratings of the desirability of the goals (Ferguson, 2007). Together, these findings suggest that successful goal pursuit (e.g. refusing a fattening snack), may at times depend on people’s ‘‘snap’’ eva...

We conduct a laboratory experiment of second-price sealed bid auctions of a common value good with two bidders. Bidders face three different types of information: common uncertainty (unknown information), private information (known by one bidder) and public information (known by both bidders), and auctions differ on the relative importance of these three types of information. We find that subje...

In this paper we give a thorough presentation of a model proposed by Tononi et al. for modeling integrated information, i.e. how much information is generated in a system transitioning from one state to the next one by the causal interaction of its parts and above and beyond the information given by the sum of its parts. We also provides a more general formulation of such a model, independent f...

Please do not cite without permission The concept of 'tradition' is used in a range of different ways within studies of British politics. Despite this there have been only a few attempts to theorise notions of tradition within British political science. Furthermore the different concepts of tradition forwarded by conservatives, interpretivists and realists have each been contested. This paper e...