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Entrepreneurs play a critical role in the socio-economic development of societies. Among these change agents, women entrepreneurs have drawn the attention of entrepreneurship scholars and policymakers recently. Nevertheless, there is a lack of attention to these entrepreneurs, especially in Arab countries. This chapter reviews the state of Algeria as an Arabic and Berber society. Therefore, after introducing the context, the chapter provides a historical overview of the country. Then, the authors review the main characteristics, motivations, and impacts of the Algerian female entrepreneurs. Afterwards, the gender-specific and constraints to women entrepreneurship in Algeria are discussed and finally, the chapter concludes with some future directions.

Recently the computational-neuroscience literature on animals' learning has proposed some models for studying organisms' decisions related to the energy to invest in the execution of actions ("vigor"). These models are based on average reinforcement learning algorithms which make it possible to reproduce organisms' behaviours and at the same time to link them to specific brain mechanisms such as phasic and tonic dopamine-based neuromodulation. This paper extends these models by explicitly introducing the dynamics of hunger, driven by energy consumption and food ingestion, and the effects of hunger on perceived reward and, consequently, vigor. The extended model is validated by addressing some experiments carried out with real mice in which reinforcement schedules delivering lower amounts of food can lead to a higher vigor compared to schedules delivering larger amounts of food due to the higher perceived reward caused by higher levels of hunger.