Artificial Economics
Update: We've had our nice little conference and it was a very successful one. Inspiring lectures, lively discussions, and an emerging 'group feeling' among the participants. (Look on the Programme page for all the presentations; See for some pictures here). Thank you all very much!
As for the future:
- AE2012 will be organized by Andrea Teglio, Universidad Jaume I, Castellón, Spain.
- AE2013 will be organized by Friederike Wall and Stephan Leitner, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria.
We hope to meet you all there!
Artificial Economics 2011 is the 7th edition of a series that started in 2005. Previous meetings took place in Treviso (2010), Valladolid (2009), Innsbruck (2008), Palermo (2007), Aalborg (2006) and Lille (2005).
The international conference is devoted to recent scientific advances in the field of Agent-Based Computational Economics. Agent-based Computational Economics deals with the computational study of economies as complex adaptive systems, composed of interacting agents with cognitive skills. This area has provoked a great deal of academic interest in various fields of Economics, especially in relation to Complex Systems approaches.
Aim and scope
The main aim of the Symposium is to facilitate the meeting of people working on different topics in different fields (mainly Economics, Finance and Computer Science) in order to encourage a structured multi-disciplinary approach to Social Sciences. Presentations and keynote sessions center around multi-agent modelling, from the viewpoint of both applications and computer-based tools.
Topics
Topics include (but are not limited to):
- Agent-Based Computational Economics
- The Economy as an Adaptive System
- Financial Markets and Organization Models
- Market Dynamics
- Agent-Based Macroeconomics
- Automated Markets and Trading Agents
- Dynamics of Social and Economic Networks
- Discrete Choice Models in Economics and Management Sciences
- Experimental Economics and Agent-Based models
- Emergence and Dynamics of Norms and Conventions
- Methodological Issues
Event form
The event will last two days in order to favour formal and informal occasions for sharing ideas. With this aim, the final schedule of the Symposium will devote considerable time to discussion. The Programme will offer presentations of papers reviewed and selected by the Programme Committee as well as special sessions by invited keynote speakers.
Organization rules were established at the start of the conference series in 2005, and can be found here.
Context
Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) deals with the computational study of economies as complex adaptive systems implying interacting agents with cognitive skills. This area has provoked, in various fields of Economics, a great deal of academic interest, in relation with the Complex System approaches.
One of the first use of agent based models has been popularized by Axelrod in his theory of evolution of cooperation. In this early work he used extensively computational simulations and methods in order to study strategic behaviour in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. This work is still influencing many researches in various scientific fields. It has for instance been the foundations of a new approach of the game theory based on computational ideas.
In the mid eighties, under the impulsion of the Santa-Fe Institute, and especially Christopher Langton, a new field of research emerged, called Artificial Life (AL). The idea of AL was to mimic real life under its various aspects to understand the basic principles of life. This has lead to encompass wider ideas such as complexity, evolution, auto-organisation and emergence. All concepts induced by those approaches have influenced social scientists among others.
Following those initial attempts to mix computational approaches and social sciences, for instance among the pioneering works using ACE in finance, one can refer to the Artificial Stock Market by Palmer, Arthur, Holland, LeBaron, and Taylor. This model, based on bounded rationality and inductive reasoning, is one of the first allowing correct simulations of real world stock market dynamics. This work has been done by people coming from various scientific fields (Economics, Game Theory, Computer Science and Finance).
Another growing field appeared, dealing with the study of the formation and the dynamics of social networks: to understand the spread of information as well as the social beliefs one has to consider the underlying social networks that can have different effects on those processes. Again physicists, computer scientists and economists join their efforts to explore the idea that economic activity is embedded in social structure.
All thoses approaches intensively use computer simulation as well as artificial intelligence concepts mostly based on multi-agents systems. In this context, the most used models come from game theory.
Agent-based Computational Economics is an important methodology in many Social-Sciences (the Management Sciences, Sociology, Economics, Conflicts Resolution, etc). It becomes now widely used to test theoretical models or to investigate their properties when analytical solutions are not possible.
