Coordinators: Thomas Brenner and Sidonia von Ledebur
Max Planck Institute for Economics Jena
Email: thomas.brenner@staff.uni-marburg.de; sidonia.vonledebur@staff.uni-marburg.de
This research area is thought to enhance the understanding of two interdependent elements: The formal apparatus of network analysis as well as the object of investigation treated with this toolset in the specific discipline of evolutionary political economy. Formal tools to describe and to simulate networks, e.g. agent based modeling, have experienced an incredible upswing in the social sciences in the recent decade; at the same time the use of these techniques did inspire a large amount of interesting new research in sociology and socioeconomics, which currently provides a feedback for methods. And several other sub-disciplines add elements to this new toolbox for evolutionary political economy (e.g. minority games in game theory, learning modeling in evolutionary biology etc). The task of this research area thus is to link insight into new formal methods to findings in actual socioeconomic networks, which might feedback on the former.