Call for Papers: a planned special issue of "Real World Economics Revue"

Call for contributions on the Social Complexity of Informal Value Exchange: A special issue/section of "Real World Economics Review"

Whilst traditionally Economics focuses on markets where the mechanisms of price and economic rationality might dominate, we call for contributions that consider a wider class of social phenomena.

That is target systems which:

• involve the passing of value in a more general sense, such as traditional value-transmission systems, informal sharing between friends, alternative currencies, general sytems to regulate and support cooperation, as well as more traditional markets
• might crucially involve other social mechanisms such as social networks, group membership, social norms, reputation, friendship, altruism, kinship, semantically rich communication etc. as well as those of price
• require research approaches that differ from those traditionally used in economics including agent-based simulation, qualitative approaches, ethnography, virtual worlds etc.. as well as those of analytic mathematics

These contributions are intended to form a special issue of the "Real-World Economics Review".  This means that submissions must be:

1. Of interest to the wide audience that reads RWER
2. To be of a non-technical nature, accessible to an informed and enquiring member of the public
3. To illustrate any abstract points with worked examples
4. To be in pure text (txt), PDF, or Word 2003/7 (.doc) format
5. To be emailed to me, Bruce Edmonds (bruce.edmonds@gmail.com) by June 15th 2011.

Contributions will be initially reviewed by a small program comittee selecting for:

• Importance in terms of the novelty and significance of their insight and ideas
• We are looking for carefully considered pieces, while unconventional views are actively sought, we are not interested to polemic per se
• Interest to and accessibility for a fairly general audience
• Relevance to the call in the sense that it goes beyond traditional economics in some of the widenings (a), (b) and (c) listed above (not necessarily all of them).

Final editorial control remains in the hands of the general RWER editor, Edward Fullbrook.

The RWER has a very large readership, so such a special issue could be influential beyond the normal confines of academia.

We are looking forward to your contributions.

Bruce Edmonds, David Hales, Mario Paolucci and Juliette Rouchier