This book collects important contributions in behavioral economics and related topics, mainly by Japanese researchers, to provide new perspectives for the future development of economics and behavioral economics. The volume focuses especially on economic studies that examine interactions of multiple agents and/or market phenomena by using behavioral economics models. Reflecting the diverse fields of the editors, the book captures broad influences of behavioral economics on various topics in economics. Those subjects include parental altruism, economic growth and development, the relative and permanent income hypotheses, wealth distribution, asset price bubbles, auctions, search, contracts, personnel management and market efficiency and anomalies in financial markets. The chapter authors have added newly written addenda to the original articles in which they address their own subsequent works, supplementary analyses, detailed information on the underlying data and/or recent literature surveys. This will help readers to further understand recent developments in behavioral economics and related research.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This collected volume represents the final outcome of the COST Action IS1104 “The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy evaluation”. Visualizing the EU as a complex and multi-layered network, the book is organized in three parts, each of them dealing with a different level of analysis: At the macro-level, Part I considers the interactions within large economic systems (regions or countries) involving trade, workers migration, and other factor movements. At the meso-level, Part II discusses interactions within specific but wide-ranging markets, with a focus on financial markets and banking systems. Lastly, at the micro-level, Part III explores the decision-making of single firms, especially in the context of location decisions.

This book is a collection of important contributions by Japanese researchers and their coauthors to present current advances in behavioral economics and finance, particularly in relation to decision making and human well-being. The topics covered in this volume include decision making under the conditions of inter-temporal choices, risk and social relations, happiness and the neuro-scientific/biological basis of behavior. The book includes works of research, both theoretical and empirical, on time discounting, time preferences, risk aversion, altruism, social status, happiness, addiction, limited attention and health and financial investments. The authors of the chapters add supplementary discussions to survey more recent advances on related topics or to provide detailed information that were abbreviated in the original publications. The addenda will enable readers to deepen their understanding of decision making and human well-being.

Handbook of Computational Economics: Heterogeneous Agent Modeling, Volume Four, focuses on heterogeneous agent models, emphasizing recent advances in macroeconomics (including DSGE), finance, empirical validation and experiments, networks and related applications. Capturing the advances made since the publication of Volume Two (Tesfatsion & Judd, 2006), it provides high-level literature with sections devoted to Macroeconomics, Finance, Empirical Validation and Experiments, Networks, and other applications, including Innovation Diffusion in Heterogeneous Populations, Market Design and Electricity Markets, and a final section on Perspectives on Heterogeneity. - Helps readers fully understand the dynamic properties of realistically rendered economic systems - Emphasizes detailed specifications of structural conditions, institutional arrangements and behavioral dispositions - Provides broad assessments that can lead researchers to recognize new synergies and opportunities

Based on recent advances in economics, especially those in behavioral economics, this book elucidates theoretically and empirically the mechanism of time-inconsistent decision making that leads to various forms of self-destructive behavior. The topics include over-eating and obesity, over-spending, over-borrowing, under-saving, procrastination, smoking, gambling, over-drinking, and other intemperate behaviors, all of which relate to serious social problems in advanced countries. In this book, the author attempts to construct a bridge between the basic theory of time discounting, especially as of hyperbolic discounting, and empirically observed “irrational (non-classical)” behavior in the various contexts just mentioned. The empirical validity of the theory is discussed using unique micro data as well as public macro data. The book proposes prescriptions for individual decision makers, whether sophisticated or naïve, to make better choices in self-control problems, and also provides policy makers with useful advice for influencing people’s decision making in the right directions. This work is recommended not only to general readers who seek to learn how to attain better self-regulation under self-control problems. It also helps researchers who seek an overview of positive and normative implications of hyperbolic discounting, and thereby reconstruct economic theory for a better understanding of actual human behavior and the resulting economic dynamics .

The economy is examined by the authors as a complex interactive system. The emphasis is on the direct interaction between agents rather than on the indirect and autonomous interaction through the market mechanism. Contributions from economists and physicists emphasise the consequences for aggregate behaviour of the interaction between agents with limited rationality. Models of financial markets which exhibit many of the stylised facts of empirical markets such as bubbles, herd behaviour and long memory are presented. This includes contributions on bargaining, buyer-seller relations, the evolution of economic networks and several aspects of macro-economic behaviour. This book will be of interest to all those interested in the foundations of collective social and economic behaviour and in particular, to those concerned with the dynamics of market behaviour and recent applications of physics to economics.

This book focuses on the latest advances in nonlinear dynamic modeling in economics and finance, mainly—but not solely—based on the description of strategic interaction by using concepts and methods from dynamic and evolutionary game theory. The respective chapters cover a range of theoretical issues and examples concerning how the qualitative theory of dynamical systems is used to analyze the local and global bifurcations that characterize complex behaviors observed in social systems where heterogeneous and boundedly rational economic agents interact. Nonlinear dynamical systems, represented by difference and differential and functional equations, are extensively used to simulate the behavior of time-evolving economic systems, also in the presence of time lags, discontinuities, and hysteresis phenomena. In addition, some theoretical issues and particular applications are discussed, as well. The contributions gathered here offer an up-to-date review of the latest research in this rapidly developing research area.