Artificial Economics
Lille, September 15-16, 2005

A Symposium in Agent-based Computational Methods
in Finance, Game Theory and their applications

Artificial Economics continue in 2006

The next release of the Artificial Economics conference will be held at Aalborg University, in September 14-15, 2006. You will find all informations concerning this event at the following URL: http://www.socsci.aau.dk/ae2006/

Context

Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) deals with the computational study of economies as complex adaptive systems implying interacting agents with cognitive skills. This area has provoked, in various fields of Economics, a great deal of academic interest, in relation with the Complex System approaches.

One of the first use of agent based models has been popularized by Axelrod in his theory of evolution of cooperation. In this early work he used extensively computational simulations and methods in order to study strategic behaviour in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. This work is still influencing many researches in various scientific fields. It has for instance been the foundations of a new approach of the game theory based on computational ideas.

In the mid eighties, under the impulsion of the Santa-Fe Institute, and especially Christopher Langton, a new field of research, called Artificial Life (AL), has emerged. The idea of AL was to mimic real life under its various aspects to understand the basic principles of life. This has lead to encompass wider ideas such as complexity, evolution, auto-organisation and emergence. All concepts induced by those approaches have influenced social scientists among others.

Following those initial attempts to mix computational approaches and social sciences, for instance among the pioneering works using ACE in finance, one can refer to the Artificial Stock Market by Palmer, Arthur, Holland, LeBaron, and Taylor. This model, based on bounded rationality and inductive reasoning, is one of the first allowing correct simulations of real world stock market dynamics. This work has been done by people coming from various scientific fields (Economics, Game Theory, Computer Science and Finance).

Recently, another growing field appeared, dealing with the study of the formation and the dynamics of social networks. To understand the spread of information as well as the social beliefs one has to consider the underlying social networks that can have different effects on those processes. This special topic is another where physicists, computer scientists and economists join their efforts to explore the idea that economic activity is embedded in social structure.

All thoses approaches intensively use computer simulation as well as artificial intelligence concepts mostly based on multi-agents systems. In this context, the most used models come from game theory.

Therefore, Agent-based Computational Economics is more and more an important methodology in many Social-Sciences (the Management Sciences, Sociology, Economics, Conflicts Resolution, etc). It becomes now widely used to test theoretical models or to investigate their properties when analytical solutions are not possible.

Aims and Scopes

The main aims of the event are to:

For its first edition, the Symposium will thus present recent scientific advances in the fields of ACE but is also widely open to methodological surveys. Topics include but are not limited to the following: