|
Discovering Artificial Economics is an informal introduction
to the ideas of modern systems theory and self-organization as they apply to problems
in the economic realm. David Batten interweaves anecdotes and stories with technical
discussions in order to provide the general reader with a good feel for how economies
function and change. Using a wealth of examples from evolutionary game theory,
to stock markets, to urban and traffic planning, Batten shows how economic agents
interact to produce the behavior we have come to recognize as economic life. Despite
the book's easy-to-read style, Batten's message is quite profound. Strongly interactive
groups of agents can produce unexpected collective behavior, emergent features
that are lawful in their own right. These patterns of emergent behavior are the
hallmark of a complex, self-organizing economy. Batten
discards many traditional axioms of economic behavior. Far from displaying perfectly
deductive rationality to achieve a predictable economic equilibrium, his agents
face an economy that is open and dynamic. There we find evolution, heterogeneity,
and instabilities; stochastic and deterministic phenomena; unexpected regularities
as well as equally unexpected, large-scale fluctuations. Interacting agents are
forced to be intuitive and adaptive, because they must respond to a continuously
changing economic landscape. Because complexity theory attempts to study a large
number of agents and their changing interaction patterns, it often gets too difficult
for a mathematical solution. Thus, many of the anecdotes and results discussed
in the book have emerged from agent-based computer simulations. The message is
that the social sciences are poised on the verge of a new scientific era, one
in which economists will conduct open-ended simulation experiments inside their
own computers. Welcome to the new age of Artificial Economics. David
F. Batten was professor of infrastructure economics at the University of Umea
in Sweden and a professorial fellow at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm
before he moved to the private sector in 1995. In between teaching at Australian,
Italian, and Swedish universities, he now manages the Melbourne office of a small,
scientific consulting firm that specializes in applied systems analysis for industry
and government. |
