Students shall improve their understanding of possibilites and limitations of economic and socio-economic agent-based modelling in a scientific context. This is achieved by reading and dicussing current and seminal papers in the field of Agent Based Computational Economics and related fields (e.g. Agent Based Computational Sociology).

The course is stuctured as a literature seminar, which deals with selected topics in a quite modern branch of Computational Economics - Agent Based Computational Economics / Modelling (ACE).

This type of modelling employs bottom-up techniques that focus on the interaction between heterogenous indiviual agents (households, firms,etc.) and their environment - based on behavioral rules. This way, various important nonlinear processes can be studied and phenomena investigated and explained, which are heavily influenced by the heterogeneity of the individuals (non-uniform distributions of attributes - age, income, wealth, etc.), their evolving specific interaction structures (social networks) and their often boundedly rational decision making, which could otherwise not be explained and understood.

Students select a topic from a list of research articles from this area and try to understand, condense and present this topic to a student audience. Furthermore, students comment on the presentations of other students.

Please register in TISS and attend the initial meeting if you plan to participate in the course (even if you are not yet perfectly sure if you will participate)

Besides deepening the understanding of economic and socioeconomic ABM models, the course is often used as a prestage of writing a master thesis in this field (and is a prerequisite for writing a master thesis with me).

written report, oral presentation (including creation and presentation of slides), participation in discussions

Visiting the course Computational Social Simulation is not a prerequiste, but at least a useful addition for deepening the understanding of the technical side of agent based modelling, its positioning in social simulation, i.e. its relation to other simulation techniques.