Evolutionary models in economics: a survey of methods and building blocks

Safarzynska, Karolina; Bergh, Jeroen C.J.M. van den

doi:10.1007/s00191-009-0153-9

Cited by 141 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 208 publications

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“…Agents are autonomous, decision-making entities pursuing certain objectives (e.g. Bonabeau 2002;Safarzyńska and van den Bergh 2010;Tesfatsion 2006). Autonomy in this sense means that the individual behavior of the agents is not determined directly (''top-down'') by a central authority, irrespective of interaction with a possibly existing central unit or feedback from the macro-to the micro-level (Epstein 2006a;Chang and Harrington 2006).…”

Section: Building Blocks Of Agent-based Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, agents are assumed to decide on basis of bounded information such that they do not have global information about the entire search space and have limited computational power (Epstein 2006a;Safarzyńska and van den Bergh 2010;Anderson 1999). Hence, although agents are usually modeled as pursuing certain goals, they are not global optimizers.…”

Section: Building Blocks Of Agent-based Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead agents merely conduct local search processes, meaning that only solutions which differ but slightly from recent solutions are discovered and considered as alternative options. Thus, agents are assumed to carry out ''myopic'' actions to achieve their goals (Axtell 2007;Safarzyńska and van den Bergh 2010).…”

Section: Building Blocks Of Agent-based Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…which are heterogeneous (Safarzyńska and van den Bergh 2010;Epstein 2006a). Agents may show differences with respect to several dimensions such as knowledge, objectives, rules for the formation of expectations, decision rules or information processing capabilities.…”

Section: Building Blocks Of Agent-based Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence, in agentbased models agents are usually not able to find the global optimum of a solution space ''instantaneously''; rather they discover the solution space stepwise in a process of searching for better solutions (e.g. Safarzyńska and van den Bergh 2010;Chang and Harrington 2006). Hence, the processes by which organizations evolve or technological changes diffuse, for example, based on the behavior of interacting agents, are a major concern in ABM.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agent-based modeling in managerial science: an illustrative survey and study

Wall

2014

Rev Manag Sci

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This article provides an overview of the current state of agent-based modeling in managerial science. In particular, the aim is to illustrate major lines of development in agent-based modeling in the field and to highlight the opportunities and limitations of this research approach. The article employs a twofold approach: First, a survey on research efforts employing agent-based simulation models related to domains of managerial science is given which have benefited considerably from this research method. Second, an illustrative study is conducted in the area of management accounting research, a domain which, so far, has rarely seen agentbased modeling efforts. In particular, we introduce an agent-based model that allows to investigate the relation between intra-firm interdependencies, performance measures used in incentive schemes, and accounting accuracy. We compare this model to a study which uses both, a principal-agent model and an empirical analysis. We find that the three approaches come to similar major findings but that they suffer from rather different limitations and also provide different perspectives on the subject. In particular, it becomes obvious that agent-based modeling allows us to capture complex organizational structures and provides insights into the processual features of the system under investigation.

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