In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: ‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum...

The discussion outlines the ways in which crisis emasculates traditional methodology as used in economics by making the core assumptions of this type of analysis (temporarily) untenable. Our critique of traditional methodology is limited to its inability to address this critical subset of social...

This paper presents an adaptive learning model for market-making under the reinforcement learn-ing framework. Reinforcement learning is a learning technique in which agents aim to maximize the long-term accumulated rewards. No knowledge of the market environment, such as the order arrival or...

The Minority Game is a simple yet highly non-trivial agent-based model for a complex adaptive system. Here, we provide an explanation of the game's fluctuations which is both intuitive and quantitative, and which applies over the entire parameter range of interest. The physical idea behind our...

We revisit a recently introduced agent model [ACS, 11, 99 (2008)], where economic growth is a consequence of education (human capital formation) and innovation, and investigate the influence of the agents’ social network, both on an agent’s decision to pursue education and on the output of...

The AgentSheets simulation software has been used for the last two years in a course for undergraduate students. The ease of use and extreme care put into the interface makes this tool a classroom success, allowing students to have hands-on experience of model construction without the overhead...

We present detailed numerical results for a modified form of the so-called Minority Game, which provides a simplified model of a competitive market. Each agent has a limited set of strategies, and competes to be in a minority. An evolutionary rule for strategy modification is included to mimic...

We study a model of a competing population of N adaptive agents, with similar capabilities, repeatedly deciding whether to attend a bar with an arbitrary cutoff L. Decisions are based upon past outcomes. The agents are only told whether the actual attendance is above or below L. For L∼N/2, the...