Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Getting Started: The Aggregation Conundrums and Basic Toolkits of Agent Based Modeling

   • Ermanno Catullo, Antonio Palestrini, Gabriele Tedeschi

   Pages 1-28

3. A Simple Model of Business Fluctuations with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents and Credit Networks

   • Leonardo Bargigli, Alessandro Caiani, Luca Riccetti, Alberto Russo

   Pages 29-102

4. Modeling Financial Markets in an Agent-Based Framework

   • Ruggero Grilli, Gabriele Tedeschi

   Pages 103-155

5. Heavy-Tailed Distributions for Agent-Based Economic Modelling

   • Fabio Clementi

   Pages 157-190

6. Back Matter

   Pages 191-205

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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.

• Agent-based Economics
• Business Fluctuations
• Economic Networks Analysis
• Financial Market Modeling
• Modeling Financial Markets
• Non-Walrasian Tradition

“The book is constructed and written in a clear manner. It provides a proper literature review on the ABM literature and on traditional economics. … The book is intended for graduate and Ph.D. students.” (Wei-Bin Zhang, Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Vol. 13, 2018)



“This volume provides an excellent, hands-on introduction to agent-based modeling in macroeconomics and finance. … it strikes a good balance between parsimony and detailed instruction. By working with this text and its online code, a student or scholar can ramp up fairly quickly to running his/her own computational experiments in R or C. … In summary, this is a highly valuable contribution.” (Christophre Georges, Journal ofEconomic Literature, Vol. 55 (2), June, 2017) 

• Università Politecnica delle Marche , Ancona, Italy

  Alessandro Caiani, Alberto Russo, Antonio Palestrini, Mauro Gallegati

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.

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