A large portion of our economic interactions involves a very small portion of the population. We seem to prefer familiar venues. But the tendency to focus our attention on a few individuals or activities is an attribute that is typically omitted in our characterization of markets. In markets...

Agent-based models typically involve large numbers of interacting individuals with widely differing characteristics, rules of behavior, and sources of information. The dynamics of such systems can be extremely complex due to their high dimensionality. This chapter discusses a general method for...

This chapter surveys research on agent-based models used in finance. It will concentrate on models where the use of computational tools is critical for the process of crafting models which give insights into the importance and dynamics of investor heterogeneity in many financial settings.

In this chapter, we assess recent contributions of computational models to the study of politics. We focus primarily on agent-based models developed by economists and political scientists. These models address collective action problems, questions related to institutional design and performance,...

This chapter examines the relationship between agent-based modeling and economic decision-making experiments with human subjects. Both approaches exploit controlled "laboratory" conditions as a means of isolating the sources of aggregate phenomena. Research findings from laboratory studies of...

This chapter explores the state of the emerging practice of designing markets by the use of agent-based modeling, with special reference to electricity markets and computerized (on-line) markets, perhaps including real-life electronic agents as well as human traders. The paper first reviews the...

An agent-based model is a virtual world comprising distributed heterogeneous agents who interact over time. In a spatial agent-based model the agents are situated in a spatial environment and are typically assumed to be able to move in various ways across this environment. Some kinds of social...