The book Deterministic Chaos in an Experimental Economic System demonstrates how human decision rules can drive a simple economy into unstable, even chaotic, behavior.
Through a laboratory-style experiment, it shows how managers steering capital investment interact with delays, backlogs, and nonlinear capacity limits.
Using a two-sector model of capital and goods production, the work traces how small misperceptions in feedback can escalate into complex dynamics. The results reveal that some subjects exhibit stable responses, while others trigger cycles or chaos, depending on how aggressively they adjust orders and react to the supply line.
- Observations come from a controlled experiment where participants manage a capital-acceleration system subject to time lags and nonlinear constraints.
- The study connects individual decision rules to broader system behavior, including stable, periodic, and chaotic regimes.
- Estimated decision rules are tested through simulation, showing that about 40% of subjects can produce unstable or chaotic dynamics.
- The analysis links parameter choices to predictability, using concepts like bifurcations and Lyapunov exponents to explain the observed patterns.
Ideal for readers interested in behavioral economics, system dynamics, and how feedback and delays shape real-world decision making.
D-3976
John Sterman (Lexington, MA) teaches at the Sloan School of Management and direct MIT's System Dynamics Group.