Discovering Artificial Economics: How Agents Learn and Economies Evolve

by David F. Batten

Overview

I’Ve live in an astornshingly complex world, Yet what we do in our everyday lives seems simple enough. Most of us conform to society’s rules, pursue familiar strategies, and achieve reasonably predictable outcomes. In our role as economic agents, we simply peddle our wares and earn our daily bread as best we can.So where on earth does this astonishing complexity come from? Much of it is ubiquitous in nature, to be sure, but part of it lies within and between us. Part of it comes from those games of interaction that humans play—games against nature, games against each other, games of competition, games of cooperation. In bygone eras, people simply hunted and gathered to come up with dinner. Today you can find theoretical economists scratching mysterious equations on whiteboards (not even blackboards) and getting paid to do this. In the modern economy, most of us make our living in a niche created for us by what others do. Because we’ve become more dependent on each other, our economy as a whole has become more strongly interactive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780429723988
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	338
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Batten, David F.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables -- Preface -- Credits -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Chance and Necessity -- 2 On the Road to know-ware -- 3 Sheep, explores, and Phase Transitions -- 4 The Ancient Art of Learning by circulating -- 5 Networks, Boosters, and Self-organized cities -- 6 Traffic near the edge of chaos -- 7 Coevolving Markets -- Notes -- References -- Index.

Editorial Reviews

Having given up teaching infrastructure economics in Europe and North America to manage a scientific consulting firm in Melbourne, Batten introduces in non-technical terms the ideas of modern systems theory and self-organization as they apply to problems in the economic realm. Evolutionary game theory, stock markets, and urban and traffic planning are among the examples he uses to explain how economic agents interact to produce unexpected features. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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