As most of you know by now I am a proud supported of complexity theory in economics. There are several recent articles that you can look at on this topic: A Brave Army of Heretics, David Warsh, Economics PrinciplesJohn Horgan on "Can Chaoplexology Save Economics?", by Barkley RosserCan Chaoplexity Save Economics?, by John Horgan Hat tip to Economist's View for two of these links. I'd also recommend Barkley Rosser's homepage for a number of papers. A number of books,...

I just wanted to recommend that people take a look at this post on Marginal Revolution. I have blogged a few times about many of the eastern countries' practices in terms of managing to improve science graduation at high school and later in university. The paper on which the MR post is based reiterates how important this has become, how China has graduates soaring into the sciences and engineering and how this will impact on future innovation and China's ability to...

Two days ago Joseph Stiglitz gave a lecture here at the University of Siena for the Workshop Benessere e Imprenditorialità. It wasn't intended solely for economists and as such was often quite superficial and cursorily dealt with some of the issues that he was trying to promote. This was quite sad for me as I have often enjoyed and appreciated what he has written in Economics and I was hoping that he might have make some more rigorous arguments for...

Subsequent to my post two days ago on the Herrmann, Thöni & Gächter paper, Simon Gächter presented some more evidence at the Faculty of Economics. Having already heard some of the stuff before I was able to think about it a bit more and to think contemplate some of the additional repercussions of the work. Moreover, because we sat there for about two hours talking about the paper and the evidence, the contributions by several individuals increased my understanding...

Herrmann et al. Cooperation and Antisocial Punishment Today's comment (probably the last one for a while depending on time and studying) is about the (2008) paper by Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni and Simon Gächter in Science.The main thrust of the paper is to do with what the authors label as 'antisocial punishment', i.e. punishing those people who are cooperating in a public goods game with you. This is contrary to most of the literature on the subject in which...

This post is a comment on the paper by Rodriguez-Sickert, Rowthorn and Guzmán (2008). It was the basis for the presentation given by Bob Rowthorn at the TECT/SOCCOP meeting. The main theses of the paper are centred around Genetic algorithms for specific behaviours Learning algorithms again for behaviours As is customary, it is assumed that individuals payoffs are not only a function of their own actions, but of the actions of others. Thus,...

This first commentary will be on the paper by Edwards, Hassall, Sutherland and Y, Selection for protection in an ant-plant mutualism: host sanctions, host modularity, and the principal agent game, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology (2006) with some additional comments on the arguments Douglas Yu put forward at the TECT meeting. The central arguments of the paper revolve around the observed facts that: mutualisms evolve from...

As my previous post said, I was at a conference (actually a work group meeting) in Barcelona for TECT. TECT is centred around the The Evolution of Cooperative Trade. The group of which I was de facto a part because of Sam Bowles is called SOCCOP, which is again to do with the evolution of social and cooperative norms. Over the next while I'll be spending some time blogging about the papers presented. I don't have the expertise to comment rigorously on all the topics...