Economics with heterogeneous interacting agents: a practical guide to agent-based modeling, Edited by Alessandro Caiani, Alberto Russo, Antonio Palestrini, Mauro Gallegati

Excerpt

Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents—A Practical Guide to Agent-Based Modeling is a clearly written and well-constructed guide to a recently popular agent-based approach to economic issues. The book is based on a workshop on agent-based models (ABM). As described in Introduction, the agent-based approach deals with economic phenomena, taking account of joint distributions of individual characteristics and dynamics of economic networks. The approach does not assume to be able to perfectly represent the preferences and to have an exact knowledge of the objective functions. A typical analytical work starts by describing the rules of behaviour. Moreover, “These rules can be derived from empirical work, from economic experiments, from studies carried out in disciplines carried out in disciplines other than economics (psychology, sociology, etc.) or from a purely normative analysis” (page: xiv).” This attitude is important for understanding so many models in the approach without close connections between different models. …