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On many occasions, individual agents
have to coordinate their economic activities. Without any actor achieving a
complete understanding of the whole system, the adaptive behavior of a large
ensemble of agents serving their individual economic goals often combines to a highly
coordinated macroscopic outcome. On the other hand, many situations occur in
which economic activities are poorly coordinated, and markets fail to achieve
efficient global outcomes. The
success or failure of individuals in coordinating their actions is still only
partially understood. There is, however, an increasing awareness of researchers in
many fields that economic and social systems consist of a large collection of
interacting economic agents. These interactions among economic agents merit
careful study in order to understand the macroscopic behavior of decentralized
economic systems. Agent-based modeling pays particular attention to the
relationship between local interactions and macroscopic properties. While the
behavior of economic actors (households, firms) has always been the natural
focus of research in economics, analysis of heterogeneity and interaction of
agents had been eschewed to a large extent due to the dominance of the paradigm
of the representative agent. However,
interaction is a pervasive and undeniable characteristic of real-world
economics. Straightforward examples include dispersion of information or
neighborhood effects which have focused so prominently in the development of
many interaction-based models. Much of what would be the focus of publications
in the new journal might be summarized by the dichotomy in the programmatic title
of Schelling’s seminal 1978 book: ‘Micromotives and Macrobehavior’ (Thomas
Schelling, New York: Norton). Ongoing theoretical research into the dynamics of
complex economic networks may provide further clues as to how coordination
normally works in decentralized economic systems, and why it occasionally fails. The Journal of Economic Interaction and
Coordination (JEIC) aims to provide a new venue for high-quality
multi-disciplinary research addressing theoretical and computational aspects of
interaction and coordination of economic agents. Contributions will not be
restricted to any particular school of thought, but need to be based on
rigorous theoretical or computational models or up-to-date econometric
methodology. JEIC will be focusing on both the study of emergent behavior in
economic activities as well as on the development of analytical and
computational tools in models with interacting economic agents. JEIC serves for sharing the most recent theoretical developments
and methodological advances, and it aims to promote interactions and
cross-fertilization among different approaches. JEIC especially encourages submission
of papers at the cutting-edge of other approaches that are relevant to economic
and social systems. This genuinely interdisciplinary approach will enable
researchers and students to expand their knowledge and to draw upon a variety
of concepts for future interdisciplinary collaborations. JEIC encourages submissions in all of the below categories: (1) Theoretical contributions to the
analysis of the role of interactions in economic systems; (2) Computation: development of
methodology and computational techniques for models with distributed evolving
agents in complex economic and social settings; (3) Laboratory experiments with human
subjects to test extent theories of collective behaviors of interacting agents; (4) Empirical validation of hypotheses
derived from agent-based models; (5) System and policy design: policy
relevant implications derived from agent-based models. JEIC is the official journal of ESHIA. the Society for
Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (ESHIA) which has
been launched in 2006. Accommodating a vibrant interdisciplinary area, the
society aims to bring together researchers focusing on agent-based approaches
in economics and neighboring fields. For more information please visit www.es-hia.org.
Having grown out of the highly
successful annual Workshops on Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents
(WEHIA), the new journal is itself a product of the self-organization of an
emerging interdisciplinary community which has experienced almost exponential
growth of its membership since the inception of the WEHIA tradition in the
historical Ancona meeting of 1995. The editorial board is backed by prominent
researchers representing all currents within the WEHIA/ESHIA community. For the
journal to become a success, we count on the community from which strong papers
need to be submitted to the new platform in order to attract readers and ensure
that it will make an impact on the development of agent-based economic
research. |
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