I made a mental note yesterday to read up on ‘microfinance’ later today when, lo and behold, I conveniently stumbled upon this advert on my way to university earlier today (the ...’s identify parts that I have skipped):
“... Crowded into thousands of impoverished villages. Powerless and therefore poor. Poor and therefore powerless.
Where to begin?...
Start with one village. Identify the stakeholders, the believers, the leaders who could make change happen. That would be women.
First, disaster relief. Then... Then... Then microfinance, the indispensible multiplier, the key to scaling up.
Money to pay for a cow. Fresh milk and something wondrous called ‘income’. The cow became a dairy, then a milk distribution business...
Soon there was $5 billion in micro-loans, 7 million borrowers, 265,000 village organizations, 52,000 schools, 8.5 million jobs and new ventures in eight other Asian and African countries...”
(Source: ‘BRAC’ advert found in ‘The Economist’, www.brac.net)
If anyone has information or recommended reading/listening/viewing regarding microfinance/microloans, please share. Thanks.
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Multiagent Resource Alloaction
Nice definition (taken from the '3rd MARA Get-Together: Workshop on Multiagent Resource Allocation'):
"the allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation."
"the allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation."
Monday, 5 May 2008
43.1, MAS: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation
Snippets taken from slides prepared and used by Ulle Endriss to teach a "Multiagent Systems: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation" course at Imperial College London in 2005
Welfare Economics: mathematical models of how the distribution of resources amongst agents affects social welfare.
Social Welfare: Utilitarian, Egalitarian, Nash Product, Pareto Optimality.
Welfare Economics: mathematical models of how the distribution of resources amongst agents affects social welfare.
Social Welfare: Utilitarian, Egalitarian, Nash Product, Pareto Optimality.
Monday, 26 November 2007
Intelligent Design
Source: The Economist, October 20th 2007
Section: Economics Focus
Title: Intelligent Design
Subtitle: A theory of an intelligently guided invisible hand wins the Nobel prize
... despite its dreary name, mechanism design is a hugely important area of economics, and underpins much of what dismal scientists do today. It goes to the heart of one of the biggest challenges in economics: how to arrange our economic interactions so that, when everyone behaves in a self-interested manner, the result is something we all like. The word "mechanism" refers to the institutions and the rules of the game that govern our economic activities...
Mechanism-design theory aims to give the invisible hand a helping hand, in particular by focusing on how to minimise the economic cost of "asymmetric information" - the problem of dealing with someone who knows more than you do...
His [Mr Hurwicz's] big idea was "incentive compatibility". The way to get as close as possible to the most efficient outcome is to design mechanisms in which everybody does best for themselves by sharing truthfully whatever private information they have that is asked for...
Section: Economics Focus
Title: Intelligent Design
Subtitle: A theory of an intelligently guided invisible hand wins the Nobel prize
... despite its dreary name, mechanism design is a hugely important area of economics, and underpins much of what dismal scientists do today. It goes to the heart of one of the biggest challenges in economics: how to arrange our economic interactions so that, when everyone behaves in a self-interested manner, the result is something we all like. The word "mechanism" refers to the institutions and the rules of the game that govern our economic activities...
Mechanism-design theory aims to give the invisible hand a helping hand, in particular by focusing on how to minimise the economic cost of "asymmetric information" - the problem of dealing with someone who knows more than you do...
His [Mr Hurwicz's] big idea was "incentive compatibility". The way to get as close as possible to the most efficient outcome is to design mechanisms in which everybody does best for themselves by sharing truthfully whatever private information they have that is asked for...
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