Introduction

A brief overview of agent-based computational economics (ACE) isgiven, followed by a synopsis of the articles included in thisspecial issue on ACE and in a companion special issue on ACEscheduled to appear in the Journal of Economic Dynamics andControl.     

ON SOCIAL LEARNING AND ROBUST EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM DESIGN IN THE COURNOT OLIGOPOLY GAME

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) combines elements from economics and computer science. In this article, the focus is on the relation between the evolutionary technique that is used and the economic problem that is modeled. In the field of ACE, economic simulations often derive parameter settings for the genetic algorithm directly from the values of the economic model parameters.
This article compares two important approaches that are dominating in ACE and shows that the above practice may hinder the performance of the genetic algorithm and thereby hinder agent learning. More specifically, it is shown that economic model parameters and evolutionary algorithm parameters should be treated separately by comparing the two widely used approaches to social learning with respect to their convergence properties and robustness. This leads to new considerations for the methodological aspects of evolutionary algorithm design within the field of ACE.     

Robust Evolutionary Algorithm Design for Socio-economic Simulation

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) combines elements from economics and computer science. In this paper, we focus on the relation between the evolutionary technique that is used and the economic problem that is modeled. In the field of ACE, economic simulations often derive parameter settings for the evolutionary algorithm directly from the values of the economic model parameters. In this paper, we compare two important approaches that are dominating ACE research and show that the above practice may hinder the performance of the evolutionary algorithm and thereby hinder agent learning. More specifically, we show that economic model parameters and evolutionary algorithm parameters should be treated separately by comparing the two widely used approaches to social learning with respect to their convergence properties and robustness. This leads to new considerations for the methodological aspects of evolutionary algorithm design within the field of ACE.     

Computational Economics als wirtschaftsinformatischer Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinären Netzwerktheorie

Standards provide for compatibility and can therefore constitute networks. A possible contribution of the discipline of IS is transcending traditional economic network analysis by incorporating an interdisciplinary view on networks with economic utility maximization and an agent-based computational economics (ACE) approach. In doing so, the complex dynamics in networks occasioned by the existence of network effects and socially situated agents with bounded rationality can be modelled using computational laboratories. This provides an important step towards evaluating and develop alternative socioeconomic structures with regard to their effects on individual behavior and social welfare.     

Intelligent agent-assisted adaptive order simulation system in the artificial stock market

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) has received increased attention and importance over recent years. Some researchers have attempted to develop an agent-based model of the stock market to investigate the behavior of investors and provide decision support for innovation of trading mechanisms. However, challenges remain regarding the design and implementation of such a model, due to the complexity of investors, financial information, policies, and so on. This paper will describe a novel architecture to model the stock market by utilizing stock agent, finance agent and investor agent. Each type of investor agent has a different investment strategy and learning method. A prototype system for supporting stock market simulation and evolution is also presented to demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of the proposed intelligent agent-based artificial stock market system architecture.     

Reproducible research in computational economics: guidelines,integrated approaches,and open source software

Traditionally, computer and software applications have been used by economists to off-load otherwise complex or tedious tasks onto technology, freeing up time and intellect to address other, intellectually more rewarding, aspects of research. On the negative side, this increasing dependence on computers has resulted in research that has become increasingly difficult to replicate. In this paper, we propose some basic standards to improve the production and reporting of computational results in economics for the purpose of accuracy and reproducibility. In particular, we make recommendations on four aspects of the process: computational practice, published reporting, supporting documentation, and visualization. Also, we reflect on current developments in the practice of computing and visualization, such as integrated dynamic electronic documents, distributed computing systems, open source software, and their potential usefulness in making computational and empirical research in economics more easily reproducible.      

APPLIED COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE FOR FINANCE AND ECONOMICS

This article introduces some relevant research works on computational intelligence applied to finance and economics. The objective is to offer an appropriate context and a starting point for those who are new to computational intelligence in finance and economics and to give an overview of the most recent works. A classification with five different main areas is presented. Those areas are related with different applications of the most modern computational intelligence techniques showing a new perspective for approaching finance and economics problems. Each research area is described with several works and applications. Finally, a review of the research works selected for this special issue is given.     

Complex agent networks: An emerging approach for modeling complex systems

Complexity and complex systems are all around us: from molecular and cellular systems in biology up to economics and human societies. There is an urgent need for methods that can capture the multi-scale spatio-temporal characteristics of complex systems. Recent emphasis has centered on two methods in particular, those being complex networks and agent-based models. In this paper we look at the combination of these two methods and identify “Complex Agent Networks”, as a new emerging computational paradigm for complex system modeling. We argue that complex agent networks are able to capture both individual-level dynamics as well as global-level properties of a complex system, and as such may help to obtain a better understanding of the fundamentals of such systems.     

Computational intelligence determines effective rationality

Rationality is a fundamental concept in economics. Most researchers will accept that human beings are not fully rational. Herbert Simon suggested that we are ＂bounded rational＂. However, it is very difficult to quantify ＂bounded rationality＂, and therefore it is difficult to pinpoint its impact to all those economic theories that depend on the assumption of full rationality. Ariel Rubinstein proposed to model bounded rationality by explicitly specifying the decision makers＇ decision-making procedures. This paper takes a computational point of view to Rubinstein＇s approach. From a computational point of view, decision procedures can be encoded in algorithms and heuristics. We argue that, everything else being equal, the effective rationality of an agent is determined by its computational power - we refer to this as the computational intelligence determines effective rationality （CIDER） theory. This is not an attempt to propose a unifying definition of bounded rationality. It is merely a proposal of a computational point of view of bounded rationality. This way of interpreting bounded rationality enables us to （computationally） reason about economic systems when the full rationality assumption is relaxed.