Introduction to Agent-Based Economics

Book excerpt: Introduction to Agent-Based Economics describes the principal elements of agent-based computational economics (ACE). It illustrates ACE's theoretical foundations, which are rooted in the application of the concept of complexity to the social sciences, and it depicts its growth and development from a non-linear out-of-equilibrium approach to a state-of-the-art agent-based macroeconomics. The book helps readers gain a better understanding of the limits and perspectives of the ACE models and their capacity to reproduce economic phenomena and empirical patterns. - Reviews the literature of agent-based computational economics - Analyzes approaches to agents' expectations - Covers one of the few large macroeconomic agent-based models, the Modellaccio - Illustrates both analytical and computational methodologies for producing tractable solutions of macro ACE models - Describes diffusion and amplification mechanisms - Depicts macroeconomic experiments related to ACE implementations