Biographical note

Wim Naudé is an economist, author, and entrepreneur. He has held appointments at Oxford University and the United Nations University (UNU) and has been a visiting faculty member at Brown University's Brown International Advanced Research Institutes. He has published widely in scientific journals, and has authored and edited books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford University Press, and Routledge. He is ranked by Stanford University /Elsevier amongst the top 2 percent of scientists in the world. Thomas Gries studied economics at Göttingen and the University of California. He received his Ph.D. at Kiel University. He also was a visiting scholar at UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki. Currently he is Professor for International Growth at Paderborn University, Germany. His research is highly interdisciplinary and covers a large variety of topics, such as economic growth and development up to and conflict economics. Nicola Dimitri is a professor of economics, former deputy rector and acting rector at the University of Siena, Italy. He has published widely in international journals and edited three books, including the 'Handbook of Procurement' (2006) for Cambridge University Press. His main interests are in game theory, AI and economics, and blockchain and cryptocurrencies.