Evolutionary Game Theory and the Modeling of Economic Behavior

Since the 1950s economists have applied game-theoretical concepts to a wide variety of economic problems. The Nash equilibrium concept has proven to be a powerful instrument in analyzing the outcome of economic processes. Since the late 1980s economists have also shown a growing interest in the application of evolutionary game theory. This paper discusses the main concepts of evolutionary game theory and their applicability to economic issues. Whereas traditional game theory focusses on the static Nash equilibria as the possible outcomes of the game, evolutionary game theory teaches us to explicitly model the behavior of individuals outside equilibrium. This may provide us with a better understanding of the dynamic forces within a society of interacting individuals.     

Why evolution does not always lead to an optimal signaling system

This paper gives a complete characterization of neutrally stable strategies for sender–receiver games in the style of Lewis, or Nowak and Krakauer [Lewis, D., 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA; Nowak, M., Krakauer, D., 1999. The evolution of language. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 96, 8028–8033]. Due to the dynamic implications of neutral stability, the replicator dynamics of this model does not necessarily lead to the rise of an optimal signaling system, where every state of the world is bijectively linked to one signal and vice versa, but it can be trapped in suboptimum situations where two (or more) signals are used for the same event, or two (or more) events are associated with one and the same signal.     

商业聚集效应的动力学分析

商业聚集促进了区域商业经济的持续增长,提升了商业企业的经济效益。聚集到底给企业带来了多大的经济效应?企业之间应该如何协调发展?通过非线性动力学建模、分析,解决了这两个实际问题,为商业企业决策提供理论参考。     

Reconceptualizing competitive dynamics: A multidimensional framework

Competitive dynamics research, despite progress, lacks a conceptual framework that can extend the field's reach to address today's environment. Increasing stakeholder power and globalization are but two of the organizational and economic forces compelling a broader conceptualization of competition. Our framework expands competitive dynamics along five dimensions—aims of competition, mode of competing, roster of actors, action toolkit, and time horizon of interaction—that prove useful for contrasting the rivalrous and competitive‐cooperative modes and a new approach we call relational competition. We draw conjectures about the moderators, such as industry and culture, that determine the appropriateness of these forms of interaction, and conclude by relating our method to three discrete perspectives: the configurational, transaction cost, and stakeholder views. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

电子商务退货物流动态行为分析

采用系统动力学的方法构建了一个基于电子商务平台的退货模型,分析了退货政策与电子商务企业的各个运营指标之间的定量关系,并运用Vensim PLE软件进行仿真实验。研究结果表明:1退货政策宽松度越高,退货率和销售率都会相对上升,这与现实相符;2当网络零售商采取有时间限制的退货策略时,如果其退货比例和业内基本一致,其可以通过提供较宽松的退货政策来提高销售量。     

医疗服务费对公立医院公益性影响的系统动力学分析

医疗服务费是医务人员技术劳动价值的体现,调整医疗服务费是当前医疗改革的焦点。本文应用系统动力学方法通过分析医疗服务费调整通过提升医师技术价值从而对医务人员诊疗行为和患者就医行为以及医药企业营销行为的影响,构建医疗服务费对医改影响的因果关系图,分析了医疗服务费调整的关键作用,即促使医方合理用药,提高诊疗质量;促使患者就诊分流,满意度提高;促使医药企业以药品质量赢得市场。最后本文根据研究结论提出相关建议:坚定医疗服务费改革的信心,并及时采取保障措施,一是医院管理制度上保障医务人员价值实现,二是加强基层医疗资源配置吸纳患者的分流。     

The Distributional Incidence of Growth: A Social Welfare Approach

This paper provides a normative framework for the assessment of the distributional incidence of growth. By removing the anonymity axiom, such framework is able to evaluate the individual income changes over time and the reshuffling of individuals along the income distribution that are determined by the pattern of income growth. We adopt a rank dependent social welfare function expressed in terms of initial rank and individual income change and we obtain partial and complete dominance conditions over different growth paths. These dominance conditions account for the different components determining the overall impact of growth, that is the size of growth and its vertical and horizontal incidence. We then provide an empirical application for Italy: this analysis shows the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis suffered by the Italian populaltion.     

Interest Rates and Credit Risk

This paper explores the effects of shifts in interest rates on corporate leverage and default in the context of a dynamic model in which the link between leverage and default risk comes from the lower incentives of overindebted entrepreneurs to guarantee firm survival. The need to finance new investment pushes firms' leverage ratio above some state‐contingent target toward which firms gradually adjust through earnings retention. The response to interest rate rises and cuts is both asymmetric and heterogeneously distributed across firms. Our results help rationalize some of the evidence regarding the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy.     

Are Small Firms Really Less Productive?

Small and medium-sized establishments (SMEs) account for a large proportion of industrial employment and production in almost all countries. Moreover, the recent literature emphasizes the role SMEs play in nurturing entrepreneurship and generating new products and processes. Although SMEs could be a source of new ideas and innovations, there are substantial productivity differences between small and large establishments. In this paper, we analyze three sources of productivity differentials: technical efficiency, returns to scale, and technical change. Our analysis on the creation, survival, and growth of new establishments in Turkish manufacturing industries in the period 1987–1997 shows that all these three factors play a very important role in determining the survival probability and growth prospects of new establishments.     

Specialization dynamics

This paper proposes a new empirical framework for analyzing specialization dynamics. A country’s pattern of specialization is viewed as a distribution across sectors, and statistical techniques for analyzing the evolution of this entire distribution are employed. The empirical framework is implemented using data on 20 industries in seven OECD countries since 1970. We find substantial mobility in patterns of specialization. Over time horizons of 5 years, this is largely explained by forces common across countries, including world prices and common changes in technical efficiency. Over longer time horizons, country-specific changes in factor endowments become more important. There is no evidence of an increase in countries’ overall degree of specialization.