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.

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.

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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 provides a state-of-the-art overview on the dynamics and coevolution in multi-level strategic interaction games. As such it summarizes the results of the European CONGAS project, which developed new mathematical models and tools for the analysis, prediction and control of dynamical processes in systems possessing a rich multi-level structure and a web of interwoven interactions among elements with autonomous decision-making capabilities. The framework is built around game theoretical concepts, in particular evolutionary and multi-resolution games, and includes also techniques drawn from graph theory, statistical mechanics, control and optimization theory. Specific attention is devoted to systems that are prone to intermittency and catastrophic events due to the effect of collective dynamics.

Today it appears that we understand more about the universe than about our interconnected socio-economic world. In order to uncover organizational structures and novel features in these systems, we present the first comprehensive complex systems analysis of real-world ownership networks. This effort lies at the interface between the realms of economics and the emerging field loosely referred to as complexity science. The structure of global economic power is reflected in the network of ownership ties of companies and the analysis of such ownership networks has possible implications for market competition and financial stability. Thus this work presents powerful new tools for the study of economic and corporate networks that are only just beginning to attract the attention of scholars.

The economic concept of networks refers to the structure of agents' interaction as well as to the economic property of positive externalities. This book describes the economics of networks from various perspectives among which are classical approaches, methods derived from physics, theory of evolutionary games, and experimental economics. These different views shed a new light on the behaviour and interaction of economic agents, on networks and on related phenomena: e.g., emergence of stable macro structures from micro interactions, standardisation, diffusion, preservation of diversity, role of heterogeneity, local learning, surplus creation and surplus allocation. The book presents the state of the art and offers a unique opportunity to understand specific networks phenomena through different theoretical and experimental approaches.