NETWORKS, HETEROGENEITY AND EVOLUTION IN ECONOMICS: A SHORT REVIEW

The articles of this special issue fall in the domain of Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE). ACE deals with a large number of different topics, ranging from macroeconomics down to the emergence of cooperation and institutions. The common denominator of this literature is the interest in the micro-foundation of meso and macro economic phenomena as emergent properties of complex systems composed by a large numbers of interacting, evolving, heterogeneous agents. The ACE literature criticizes mainstream economic models for disregarding the following essential features: i) heterogeneity; ii) bounded rationality / asymmetry of information; iii) disequilibrium / interaction; iv) non linearity / complexity. These four elements are the polar opposite of the assumptions the basic macro DSGE model. As it is known, the latter does away with these features and, not surprisingly, these models perform poorly from an empirical standpoint. Nowadays, the split between mutually opposing approaches is probably less severe in other fields of economics than in macro, but it seems fair to say that a degree of tension between mainstream and heterodox economics is still in place in the discipline. We wish to claim that this schism between paradigms should be reassembled, and substituted by the competition among alternative hypotheses under a common framework. We believe that the articles collected in this special issue offer to the reader a representative sample of the ongoing efforts of ACE researchers to push further the frontier of knowledge in the challenging field of economics. We really hope that all colleagues, but especially young scholars interested in ACE, will find the contributions that we publish today useful for their research.