Coordinators: Alessandro Caiani
Scuolo Universitaria Superiore Pavia, Italy
alessandro.caiani@iusspavia.it
Andrea Roventini
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies - Pisa, Italy
andrea.roventini@santannapisa.it

The use of computer simulations in economics goes back to the sixties, when large-scale mainframe econometric models with aggregate equations were used to simulate the US economy for the first time. Since then, the amount and variety of simulations has increased steadily, especially in evolutionary economics. In particular, the increasing availability of cheap computing power has allowed researchers to model and simulate the interactions between large numbers of boundedly rational, heterogeneous agents.

RA-S organizes sessions at the annual EAEPE conferences and provides the opportunity for researchers working on/with evolutionary computational simulations to meet and exchange ideas. Special attention is given to interdisciplinary approaches addressing the evolution of economic agents and institutions in non-equilibrium processes under bounded rationality and social learning. In particular, we look for contributions offering new insights to collective action problems in the context of macroeconomics, institutionalism and political economy. Through the use of approaches from evolutionary economics and complex adaptive systems, we want to shed light on problems such as:

  • evolutionary macroeconomics: endogenous technological change and/or consumer dynamics in agent-based macroeconomic models, micro-meso-macro simulation, endogenous money, investment-finance interlinkages, bubbles and crashes, strutural change, fiscal and monetary policies in agent-based macroeconomic models
  • complex adaptive systems in political economy:  individual and social choices, multi-level governance, evolution of cooperation, institutional life-cycles, power and transformation, culture-environment co-evolution, industrial change, socio-ecological transformation

Of course, we are also happy to discuss the development of the method as such in a critical way.