Understanding the mechanism of a socio-economic system requires more than an understanding of the individuals that comprise the system. It also requires understanding how individuals interact with each other, and how the agg- gated outcome can be more than the sum of individual behaviors. This book contains the papers fostering the formation of an active multi-disciplinary community on socio-economic systems with the exciting new ?elds of age- based modeling and econophysics. We especially intend to increase the awareness of researchers in many ?elds with sharing the common view many economic and social activities as collectives of a large-scale heterogeneous and interacting agents. Economists seek to understand not only how individuals behave but also how the interaction of many individuals leads to complex outcomes. Age- based modeling is a method for studying socio-economic systems exhibiting the following two properties: (1) the system is composed of interacting agents, and (2) the system exhibits emergent properties, that is, properties arising from the interactions of the agents that cannot be deduced simply by agg- gating the properties of the system’s components. When the interaction of the agents is contingent on past experience, and especially when the agents continually adapt to that experience, mathematical analysis is typically very limited in its ability to derive the outcome.

Understanding the mechanism of a socio-economic system requires more than an understanding of the individuals that comprise the system. It also requires understanding how individuals interact with each other, and how the agg- gated outcome can be more than the sum of individual behaviors. This book contains the papers fostering the formation of an active multi-disciplinary community on socio-economic systems with the exciting new ?elds of age- based modeling and econophysics. We especially intend to increase the awareness of researchers in many ?elds with sharing the common view many economic and social activities as collectives of a large-scale heterogeneous and interacting agents. Economists seek to understand not only how individuals behave but also how the interaction of many individuals leads to complex outcomes. Age- based modeling is a method for studying socio-economic systems exhibiting the following two properties: (1) the system is composed of interacting agents, and (2) the system exhibits emergent properties, that is, properties arising from the interactions of the agents that cannot be deduced simply by agg- gating the properties of the system’s components. When the interaction of the agents is contingent on past experience, and especially when the agents continually adapt to that experience, mathematical analysis is typically very limited in its ability to derive the outcome.

Publisher description

This volume sheds light on the current state of complex networks and nonlinear dynamics applied to the understanding of economic and social phenomena ranging from geographical economics to macroeconomics and finance, and its purpose is to give readers an overview of several interesting topics for research at an intermediate level. Three different and interdisciplinary, but complementary, aspects of networks are put together in a single piece, namely: (i) complex networks theory, (ii) applied network analysis to social and economic interrelations, and (iii) dynamical evolution of systems and networks. The volume includes contributions from excellent scholars in economics and social sciences as well as leading experts in the fields of complex networks and nonlinear dynamics.

Complex systems analysis has become a fascinating topic in modern research on non-linear dynamics, not only in the physical sciences but also in the life sciences and the social sciences. After the era of bifurcation theory, chaos theory, syn- getics, resilience analysis, network dynamics and evolutionary thinking, currently we observe an increasing interest in critical transitions of dynamic real-world systems in many disciplines, such as demography, biology, psychology, economics, earth sciences, geology, seismology, medical sciences, and so on. The relevance of this approach is clearly re?ected in such phenomena as traf?c congestion, ?nancial crisis, ethnic con?icts, eco-system breakdown, health failures, etc. This has prompted a world-wide interest in complex systems. Geographical space is one of the playgrounds for complex dynamics, as is witnessed by population movements, transport ?ows, retail developments, urban expansion, lowland ?ooding and so forth. All such dynamic phenomena have one feature in common: the low predictability of uncertain interrelated events occurring at different interconnected spatio-temporal scale levels and often originating from different disciplinary backgrounds. The study of the associated non-linear (fast and slow) dynamic transition paths calls for a joint research effort of scientists from different disciplines in order to understand the nature, the roots and the con- quences of unexpected or unpredictable changes in complex spatial systems.

The uneven geographical distribution of economic activities is a huge challenge worldwide and also for the European Union. In Krugman’s New Economic Geography economic systems have a simple spatial structure. This book shows that more sophisticated models should visualise the EU as an evolving trade network with a specific topology and different aggregation levels. At the highest level, economic geography models give a bird eye’s view of spatial dynamics. At a medium level, institutions shape the economy and the structure of (financial and labour) markets. At the lowest level, individual decisions interact with the economic, social and institutional environment; the focus is on firms’ decision on location and innovation. Such multilevel models exhibit complex dynamic patterns – path dependence, cumulative causation, hysteresis – on a network structure; and specific analytic tools are necessary for studying strategic interaction, heterogeneity and nonlinearities.

Agent-based modeling/simulation is an emergent approach to the analysis of social and economic systems. It provides a bottom-up experimental method to be applied to social sciences such as economics, management, sociology, and politics as well as some engineering fields dealing with social activities. This book includes selected papers presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Agent-Based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems held in Tokyo in 2007. It contains two invited papers given as the plenary and invited talks in the workshop and 21 papers presented in the six regular sessions: Organization and Management; Fundamentals of Agent-Based and Evolutionary Approaches; Production, Services and Urban Systems; Agent-Based Approaches to Social Systems; and Market and Economics I and II. The research presented here shows the state of the art in this rapidly growing field.