Standard modeling procedures treat the behavior of economic variables using stochastic-determinate equations. Two alternatives to this approach arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century: deterministic nonlinear equation models and agent-based models. The class of deterministic nonlinear...

The traditional mechanism of finding Nash equilibria presumes that economic actors are capable of performing computations which even computers would take far too long to perform. A decentralized and parallel process of interactions between simple economic actors is presented as a more plausible...

Austrian macroeconomists of the interwar period saw the economy as a complex adaptive system, in which macroeconomic variables emerge from the interaction between millions of purposefully acting agents. Recent advances in computation technology allow us to build empirically salient synthetic...

We study a simple coordination problem to understand the difference between centralized and decentralized economic systems. The decentralized system is more robust than the centralized system to communication errors. But the centralized system takes less time than the decentralized system to...

Empirical evidence shows monetary shocks have two temporary effects on the distribution of prices. One, the dispersion of cross-section of prices increases in response to monetary shocks. Two, some prices change in the "wrong" direction: some prices decrease in response to positive monetary...

This paper argues that NGDP targeting is unlikely to produce macroeconomic stability. Contrary to the policy objective, NGDP targeting can increase macroeconomic turbulence. DSGE models that prove the effectiveness of NGDP stabilization policy rest on two assumptions. The first assumption is...

We explore extended liability for bank shareholders as a method for mitigating moral hazard in insured banks. The dominant approach to maintaining financial stability employs piecemeal regulations concerning specific bank behaviors; we propose this difficult practice can be sidestepped by...