Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents: A Practical Guide to Agent-Based Modeling

This book offers a practical guide to Agent Based economic modeling, adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze Agent Based models. After providing them with a basic “toolkit” for Agent Based modeling, it present and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. 

While stressing the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, the book also highlights the logic and practical steps that characterize the model building procedure. A detailed description of the underlying codes, developed using R and C, is also provided. In addition, each didactic model is accompanied by exercises and applications designed to promote active learning on the part of the reader. Following the same approach, the book also presents several complementary tools required for the analysis and validation of the models, such as sensitivity experiments, calibration exercises, economic network and statistical distributions analysis.

By the end of the book, the reader will have gained a deeper understanding of the Agent Based methodology and be prepared to use the fundamental techniques required to start developing their own economic models.

Accordingly, “Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents” will be of particular interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academic institutions and lecturers interested in including an overview of the AB approach to economic modeling in their courses.

Mauro Gallegati is Professor of Economics at the Polytechnic University of Marche (Ancona, Italy). His research includes business fluctuations, nonlinear dynamics, models of financial fragility, and heterogeneous interacting agents. He has published books and many papers in leading journals in the fields of economics, economic history and history of economic analysis, nonlinear mathematics, applied economics, complexity, and econophysics. He has been involved in several international research projects since 2004.