In this paper, we study the self-coordination problem as demonstrated by the well-known El Farol Bar problem (Arthur, 1994), which later becomes what is known as the Minority Game in the econophysics community. While the El Farol problem or the minority game has been studied for almost two decades, existing studies are most concerned with efficiency only. The equality issue, however, has been l...

Two distinct learning mechanisms are considered for a population of agents who engage in decentralized search for the common optimum. An agent may choose to learn via innovation (individual learning) or via imitation (social learning). The agents are endowed with heterogeneous skills in engaging in the two modes of learning. When the agents choose imitation, they also choose whom to learn from....

Secrecy is considered inferior to patenting from the social welfare point of view due to limited dissemination of associated information. In a simple two-stage model where the success of the second innovation depends on information about the first innovation and complementary individual inspiration, this study shows that, if the number of firms pursuing the second innovation is exogenously give...

In this paper, I illustrate the importance of both dynamics and network constraints in the group formation process. I introduce a class of games called sequential group formation games, in which players make their group membership decisions sequentially over time, and show that the dynamics act as an equilibrium refinement. However, the resulting equilibrium is highly suboptimal–groups tend to ...

Although both betweenness and closeness centrality are claimed to be important for the effectiveness of someone’s network position, it has not been explicitly studied which networks emerge if actors follow incentives for these two positional advantages. We propose such a model and observe that network dynamics differ considerably in a scenario with either betweenness or closeness incentives com...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of “difference aversion” and whether happiness levels influence the taste for social comparisons. Our decision tasks disti...

The multi-agent resource allocation problem corresponds to the negotiation of m resources among n autonomous agents, in order to maximize a social welfare function. Contrary to some former studies, the purpose is neither here to simply determine a socially optimal resource allocation nor to prove the existence of a transaction sequence leading to this optimum, but to find a practical transactio...

If A is a set of social alternatives, a social choice rule (SCR) assigns a subset of A to each potential profile of individuals’ preferences over A, where the subset is interpreted as the set of ‘‘welfare optima’’. A game form (or ‘‘mechanism’’) implements the social choice rule if, for any potential profile of preferences, (i) any welfare optimum can arise as a Nash equilibrium of the game for...

We consider a Cournot oligopoly model where multiple suppliers (oligopolists) compete by choosing quantities. We compare the social welfare achieved at a Cournot equilibrium to the maximum possible, for the case where the inverse market demand function is convex. We establish a lower bound on the efficiency of Cournot equilibria in terms of a scalar parameter derived from the inverse demand fun...

abstract- according to article 44 of the i.r. of iran constitution, the iranian economy consists of three sectors; the state, the cooperative, and the private sectors. the aim of this study was to present a hierarchy of criteria for selecting the best economic sector for agricultural development. analytic hierarchy process (ahp) was used to calculate the relative importance of either criteria o...