From Agent-Based Computational Economics towards Cognitive Economics

Overview & Synopsis

This paper provides a short introduction to Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), in order to underline the interest of such an approach in cognitive economics. Section 2 provides a brief bird’s eye view of ACE. In section 3, some interesting features of the Santa-Fe Approach to complexity are then introduced by taking simple examples using the Moduleco computational laboratory. Section 4 provides a short introduction to the object-oriented architecture of the Moduleco’s framework. Section 5 underlines the interest of ACE for modelling and exploring dynamic features of markets viewed as cognitive and complex social interactive systems. Simple examples of simulations based on two cognitive economics models are briefly discussed. The first one, deals with the so-called exploration-exploitation compromise, while the second deal with social influence and dynamics over social networks.