Related papers: An Apology for Money
Reviews contain rich information about product characteristics and user interests and thus are commonly used to boost recommender system performance. Specifically, previous work show that jointly learning to perform review generation…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…
We study a game where households convert paper assets, such as money, into consumption goods, to preempt inflation. The game features a unique equilibrium with high (low) inflation, if money supply is high (low). For intermediate levels of…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…
When allocating indivisible items, there are various ways to use monetary transfers for eliminating envy. Particularly, one can apply a balanced vector of transfer payments, or charge each agent a positive amount, or -- contrarily -- give…
The use of digital money has become increasingly popular, but it comes with certain drawbacks. For instance, it can be challenging to make payments during power outages or internet failures. Additionally, some groups may find it difficult…
Monetary markets serve as established resource allocation mechanisms, typically achieving efficient solutions with limited information. However, they are susceptible to market failures, particularly under the presence of public goods,…
Utilizing common resources is always a dilemma for community members. While cooperator players restrain themselves and consider the proper state of resources, defectors demand more than their supposed share for a higher payoff. To avoid the…
When users access shared resources in a selfish manner, the resulting societal cost and perceived users' cost is often higher than what would result from a centrally coordinated optimal allocation. While several contributions in mechanism…
Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures,…
Defeasible reasoning is the mode of reasoning where conclusions can be overturned by taking into account new evidence. A commonly used method in cognitive science and logic literature is to handcraft argumentation supporting inference…
It is widely assumed that increases in economic productivity necessarily lead to economic growth. In this paper, it is shown that this is not always the case. An idealized model of an economy is presented in which a new technology allows…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
The question of how a pure fiat currency is enforced and comes to have a non-zero value has been much debated (Selgin, 1994). What is less often addressed is the case where the enforcement is taken for granted and we ask what value (in…
The question of how people form their opinion has fascinated economists and sociologists for quite some time. In many of the models, a group of people in a social network, each holding a numerical opinion, arrive at a shared opinion through…
Word of mouth is a process by which consumers transmit positive or negative sentiment to other consumers about a business. While this process has long been recognized as a type of promotion for businesses, the value of word of mouth is…
Exchange of resources among individual components of a system is fundamental to systems like a social network of humans and a network of cities and villages. For various reasons, the human society has come up with the notion of money as a…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…