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Alan Kirman and Jean-Benoit Zimmermann GREQAM -Universite d'Aix-Marseille, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseille CNRS -GREQAM, Marseille This book continues in a tradition which has developed in the annual Workshops on Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, (WEHIA). The purpose of that workshop was to analyse situations in which individual agents, who might be different from each other, interact and produce behaviour on the aggregate level which does not correspond to that of the average actor. This rupture with the well established tradition of the "representative individual" is far from having established a central position in economics. That the relaxation of that assumption and the introduction of heterogeneous individuals might change the relationship between micro behaviour and macro phenomena is clearly spelled out by Forni and Lippi (1997). The modelling of the actual interaction between these individuals has been and remains a challenge. Early analytical attempts to introduce direct and local interaction between agents such as in the pioneering work of Follmer (1974) met with little response and the recent wave of interest associated with the names of Aoki (1996), Durlauf (1997) and Blume (1993) amongst others was twenty years in the making. Yet, the influence of other disciplines such as physics and biology in which complex interactive systems and their analysis play a central role is now making itself felt in economics and the papers in this volume reflect that fact.
List of contents
PartI: Social Networks.- A Simple Model of Fads and Cascading Failures on Sparse Switching Networks.- Self Organised Criticality in Economic and Social Networks - The Case of Innovation Diffusion.- Social Percolators and Self Organized Criticality.- Lock-out in Social Networks.- Cooperation, Adaptation and the Emergence of Leadership.- PartII: From micro to macro behaviours.- Technology Diffusion, Stability and Decay: Some Results.- On Dynamic Re-Specifications of Kiyotaki-Wright Model.- Industrial Dynamics with Quasi-Zero Intelligence Interacting Firms.- PartIII: Finance.- Stability of Pareto-Zipf Law in Non-stationary Economies.- Toy Models of Markets with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents.- Price Bubbles and the Long Run Profitability of a Trend Following Technical Trading Rule.- Firms' Financial Heterogeneity and Business Cycles.- PartIV: Coalitions.- Stable Coalition Structures with Fixed Decision Scheme.- Coalition Formation with Heterogeneous Agents.- Location Games with Externalities.- V: Interactions and Knowledge.- "Simon says..." What ? - Rationality of Imitation in a Simonian Perspective.- Interacting Individuals and Organizations: a Case Study on Cooperations Between Firms and Research Laboratories.- Organisational Innovation, Communities of Practice and Epistemic Communities: the Case of Linux.- Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Diffusion and Network Structure.
