Interaction and Market Structure: Essays on Heterogeneity in Economics

✍ Scribed by Domenico Delli Gatti, Mauro Gallegati, Alan P. Kirman (auth.), Prof. Domenico Delli Gatti, Prof. Mauro Gallegati, Prof. Alan Kirman (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 301
• Series: Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems 484
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is a collection of essays which examine how the properties of aggregate variables are influenced by the actions and interactions of heterogenous individuals in different economic contexts. The common denominator of the essays is a critique of the representative agent hypothesis. If this hypothesis were correct, the behaviour of the aggregate variable would simply be the reproduction of individual optimising behaviour. In the methodology of the hard sciences, one of the achievements of the quantum revolution has been the rebuttal of the notion that aggregate behaviour can be explained on the basis of the behaviour of a single unit: the elementary particle does not even exist as a single entity but as a network, a system of interacting units. In this book, new tracks in economics which parallel the developments in physics mentioned above are explored. The essays, in fact are contributions to the analysis of the economy as a complex evolving system of interacting agents.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages I-VI
Introduction....Pages 1-7
Learning to Trade and Mediate....Pages 9-32
Learning to Be Loyal. A Study of the Marseille Fish Market....Pages 33-56
On New Phenomena in Dynamic Promotional Competition Models with Homogeneous and Quasi-homogeneous Firms....Pages 57-87
A Reconsideration of Professor Iwai’s Schumpeterian Dynamics....Pages 89-131
Agents’ Heterogeneity, Aggregation, and Economic Fluctuations....Pages 133-149
The Dynamic Interaction of Rational Fundamentalists and Trend Chasing Chartists in a Monetary Economy....Pages 151-165
Self-Organization in Global Stochastic Models of Production and Inventory Dynamics....Pages 167-183
Heterogeneous Agents, Complementarities, and Diffusion....Pages 185-206
Market Organization: Noncooperative Models of Coalition Formation....Pages 207-223
Evolutionary Selection of Correlation Mechanisms for Coordination Games....Pages 225-234
The Propagation of Cooperation in a Spatial Model of Learning with Endogenous Aspirations....Pages 235-252
Expectation Formation in a Cobweb Economy: Some One Person Experiments....Pages 253-266
Fecund, Cheap and Out of Control: Heterogeneous Economic Agents as Flawed Computers vs. Markets as Evolving Computational Entities....Pages 267-298
Back Matter....Pages 299-302

✦ Subjects

Microeconomics; Economic Theory; Game Theory/Mathematical Methods