Discovering Artificial Economics - How Agents Learn and Economies Evolve

Taken from Wetting the Appetite: According to the MIT economist Paul Krugman, we’re caught up in the “Age of Diminished Expectations.”l Despite the recent resurgence in U.S. growth, many other parts of the global economy are not doing well, compared with previous expectations. This unhealthy mixture of bliss and disaster has triggered a great deal of critical debate about economics. In many parts of the Western world, it’s been the age of the policy entrepreneur: that economist who tells politicians precisely what they want to hear. Thankfully, the nonsense preached by some of these opportunists has been condemned by most serious economists.2 But the fallout still lingers. In the eyes of an unforgiving public, misguided policy entrepreneurship has undermined the credibility of economics as a trustworthy discipline.

Written by: David F. Batten.

Contents:

* Chance and Necessity
o “Wetting” the Appetite
o Sandpiles, Self-Organization, and Segregation
o Power Laws and Punctuated Equilibria
o Bulls, Bears, and Fractals
o Stasis and Morphogenesis
o On Learning Curves
* On the Road to Know-Ware
o What is Knowledge?
o Finding the Road to Know-Ware
o The Age of Deception
o Seeing the Light at the El Farol
o The Emergence of Cooperation
o Coevolutionary Learning
* Sheep, Explorers, and Phase Transitions
o The Fallacy of Composition
o Irreducible Interactions
o Getting Well Connected
o Sheep and Explorers
o Are You an Inductive Graph Theorist?
* The Ancient Art of Learning by Circulating
o Pirenne’s Hypothesis
o The Mees Analysis
o Learning by Circulating
o Big Buttons and a Critical Thread
o Ephemeral Entrepots
* Networks, Boosters, und Self-Organized Cities
o The Shortest Network Problem
o Pirenne Again?
o Selective Urban Growth
o One Great Metropolis
o Networking Futures
o City-Size Distributions Obey Power Laws
o Artificial Cities
* Traffic Near the Edge of Chaos
o The Driver’s Dilemma
o In Whose Best Interests?
o Sheep, Explorers, and Bounded Rationality
o Cellular Congestion
o Coevolutionary Learning in Congested Traffic
o Edge-of-Chaos Management
* Coevolving Markets
o Are Stock Markets Efficient?
o Pattern Recognizers
o Scaling the Market’s Peaks
o Fibonacci Magic
o Market Moods
o Reading the Market’s Mind
o How Markets Learn
* Artificial Economics
o Limits to Knowledge
o Adaptive Agents and the Science of Surprise
o The New Age of Artificial Economics
o Growing a Silicon Society
o Some Final Words

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ308/tesfatsion/Batten.EntireBook.pdf