Category archives: Economics

Altcoins could provide a green solution to energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies

Altcoins could provide a green solution to energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies

Computer scienceEconomics

By Invited Researcher

The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy […]

Participatory budgeting, some issues

Participatory budgeting, some issues

Economics

By Invited Researcher

Participatory budgeting seeks to involve some form of public deliberation in the budget allocation of a city or town. The first process took place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the late eighties. Since then the practice spread through the world, with more than 7,000 processes around the world in 2018. The logic underpinning participatory budgeting […]

Cost of energy and its variability can be reduced in tidal power

Cost of energy and its variability can be reduced in tidal power

EconomicsEnergyMechanical Engineering

By BCAM

Tides are more predictable than winds or sunshine. Then, why are not they already widely used as a source of renewable energy? The simple answer is that designing and building an ocean energy array is quite complex. This complexity has an associated variability in the cost of energy that makes projects difficult to evaluate from […]

The properties that characterize the definition of Nash equilibrium

The properties that characterize the definition of Nash equilibrium

EconomicsMathematics

By José Luis Ferreira

Strategic decision is the object of study for Game Theory, a discipline that started officially with the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern . For non-cooperative games, i.e., games in which individuals make decisions individually and with no strings attached, the book was restricted to zero-sum […]

Is boost the new nudge?

Is boost the new nudge?

Economics

By José Luis Ferreira

Here, I summarize the discussion on the normative differences between nudges and boosts presented in Sims and Müller, 2019 . Behavioral Economics studies the systematic biases in economic decisions that occur because our cognitive processes are constrained and, thus, context-neutral optimization is impracticable. This area of research started with Tversky and Kahneman (1974) , and […]