Related papers: An Apology for Money
St. Francis of Assisi (1181/82-1226) famously called money the devil's dung, and indeed money is often associated with greed, inequality, and corruption. Drawing on Nowak's five rules for the evolution of cooperation, we argue here that…
With the growing popularity and rising value of cryptocurrencies, skepticism surrounding this groundbreaking innovation persists. Many financial and business experts argue that the value created in the cryptocurrency realm resembles the…
A (very) brief review of topological defects and their possible cosmic roles. I emphasize in particular that superheavy defects needed for structure formation can peacefully coexist with inflation, despite the claims to the contrary which…
I summarize the recent work on market (in)efficiency, highlighting key elements why financial markets will never be made efficient. My approach is not by adding more empirical evidence, but giving plausible reasons as to where inefficiency…
This article shows how the Universities and higher education and research institutions obey more and more to criteria of profitability and effectiveness, following the example of the industry. The Universities and the academic communities…
Financial derivatives have often been criticized as casino-style betting instruments. It turns out that many naive ways of making them are indeed equivalent to gambling. Fortunately, this inadvertent effect can be understood and prevented.…
The article discusses the controversy over infinite growth. It analyzes the two dominant perspectives on economic growth and finds them based on a limited and subjective view of reality. An examination of the principal aspects of economic…
The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led…
The scale and terms of aggregate borrowing in an economy depend on the manner in which wealth is distributed across potential creditors with heterogeneous beliefs about the future. This distribution evolves over time as uncertainty is…
Understanding consumption dynamics and its impact on the whole economy and welfare within the present economic crisis is not an easy task. Indeed the level of consumer demand for different goods varies with the prices, consumer incomes and…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
This summarizes the study of the financial and economic crisis in Europe. The starting questions were: 1) Why do we have a crisis? Unde venis? 2) What will be the outcome? Quo vadis? Here is the reasoning which touches many areas, ranging…
Interbank lending and borrowing occur when financial institutions seek to settle and refinance their mutual positions over time and circumstances. This interactive process involves money creation at the aggregate level. Coordination…
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly…
Counterfactual explanations are emerging as an attractive option for providing recourse to individuals adversely impacted by algorithmic decisions. As they are deployed in critical applications (e.g. law enforcement, financial lending), it…
Model-checking resource logics with production and consumption of resources is a computationally hard and often undecidable problem. We introduce a simple and realistic assumption that there is at least one diminishing resource, that is, a…
The aim of this of this paper is to study infinite games and to prove formally some properties in this framework. As a consequence we show that the behavior (the madness) of people which leads to speculative crashes or escalation can be…
The article presents a translation of some widespread financial terminology into the language of decision theory. For instance, financial leverage can be regarded as an object of choice or a decision. We show how the optics of decision…
The paper discusses various practical consequences of treating economics and finance as an inherently dynamic and chaotic system. On the theoretical side this looks at the general applicability of the market-making pricing approach to…
This paper explores how ambiguity affects communication. We consider a cheap talk model in which the receiver evaluates the sender's message with respect to its worst-case expected payoff generated by multiplier preferences. We characterize…