Syllabus of Readings for Complex Adaptive Systems
and Agent-Based Computational Economics:

5. Social Evolution

Last Updated: 5 August 2006

Site maintained by:

Leigh Tesfatsion

Department of Economics

Iowa State University

Ames, Iowa 50011-1070

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/

tesfatsi AT iastate.edu

Main Syllabus Menu Page:

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/sylalife.htm

Table of Contents:

• Adaptation, Learning, and Innovation
• Game Theory Approaches to Social Evolution

Social Evolution

A. Adaptation, Learning, and Innovation

• A website titled Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences is maintained by Johann Peter Murmann and Joe Fleischhacker at Northwestern University. Resources available at this web site include working papers, book announcements and reviews, journal announcements, conference information, and a discussion forum.

• Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Blake LeBaron, Andrew W. Lo, and Andreas S. Weigend, eds., Computational Finance, The MIT Press, 2000, 650 pp., ISBN: 0-262-51107-X.
  From the publisher: "Computational finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, draws extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems, and financial economics. This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods are applied to a wide range of problems in finance, including risk management, asset allocation, style analysis, dynamic trading and hedging, forecasting, and option pricing. The book is based on the sixth annual international conference Computational Finance 1999, held at New York University's Stern School of Business."

  P. Ahrweiler and Nigel Gilbert (eds.), Computer Simulations in Science and Technology Studies, Springer-Verlag, 1998, 244 pp., $78.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 3-540-64871-2

  From the publisher: "What is it about the structure and organisation of science and technology that has led to the spectacularly successful growth of knowledge during this century? This book answers this important and much debated question in an innovative way, by using computer simulations. It is among the first to apply the tools of simulation systematically to a specific domain: science and technology studies. The first introductory section is followed by three application areas: simulations of scientific discovery and theory formation; evolutionary models of science and technology; and models which explore the conditions and dependencies of scientific work."

  P. Ahrweiler is at the Universiry of Bielefeld, Germany, and N. Gilbert is at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.

  Peter S. Albin, Barriers and Bounds to Rationality: Essays on Economic Complexity and Dynamics in Interactive Systems, Princeton University Press, c. 1998, 296 pp., ISBN: 0-691-02676-9 (cloth).

  From the publisher: "Peter Albin is known for his work in applying the concepts of adaptive dynamical systems, first developed by biologists and physicists, to the study of economic systems. This book is a collection of his articles on the application of cellular automata and complexity theory to economic problems. Duncan Foley provides a thoughtful introduction in which he reviews the disparate analytical sources of Albin's work in the theories of nonlinear dynamical systems, economic dynamics, cellular automata, linguistic and computational complexity, and bounded rationality."

  Peter S. Albin is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the City University of New York. Duncan K. Foley is Professor of Economics at Barnard College of Columbia University.

  Phillip W. Anderson, Kenneth J. Arrow, and David Pines, eds., The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Santa Fe Institute, 1988. [Proceedings of the Global Economy Workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in September, 1987.]

  W. Brian Arthur, Steven N. Durlauf, and David Lane (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Volume XXVII, Addison Wesley, 1997.

  Proceedings of the Global Economy Workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in August, 1995. A review of this proceedings volume has been prepared by Gerald Silverberg (MERIT, Maastricht, the Netherlands).

  Robert Aunger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as as a Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 256 pp., March 2001. ISBN: 0-192-63244-2.

  From an Amazon.Com review by Howard E. Aldrich: "Unlike most edited volumes based on conferences, which typically read like random collections of papers glued between two covers, Aunger's edited volume displays a remarkable coherence. Against all odds, he enticed a highly diverse group of academics to Cambridge who then constructively debated the status of memetics as a science. ... Aungur provides excellent introductory and concluding chapters, which constitute valuable contributions in themselves. Chapter 1 beautifully lays out the issues and provides a constructive guide to the issues over which the contributers struggled. Chapter 11 concludes the book with an assessment of the contributors' arguments and a frank admission of his own skepticism. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the concept of memes, cultural and social evolution, and the cultural divide between the natural and social sciences." socevol.htm

  Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think, Free Press, 392 pp., July 2002, ISBN: 0-743-20150-7.

  From the publisher: "What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, (this book) will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices."

  Robert Aunger is affiliated with the Department of Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

  Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, The Free Press, 184 pages, 1999, ISBN: 0-684-86717-6.

  From the publisher: "This simple paradigm-shifting analysis of how people work together will transform the way we think about getting things done in a group. Harnessing Complexity is the essential guide to creating wealth, power, and knowledge in the 21st century."
  

  Robert Axelrod is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Michael Cohen is Professor of Information and Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

  Dimitris Ballas, David Rossiter, Bethan Thomas, Graham Clarke, and Danny Dorling, Geography Matters: Simulation the Local Impacts of National Social Policies, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 140 pp., January 2005. ISBN: 1-859-35265-0.

  From D. Ballas: "(This book) is a guide to the development of microsimulation techniques in research. (It) builds on past work in the area of microsimulation to present a new spatial simulation methodology. It discusses the conceptual and practical issues of microsimulation, highlighting the differences between static and dynamic microsimulation. The authors outline how a geographical microsimulation model can be built and explain the geographical simulation method clearly, keeping mathematical and statistical jargon to a minimum. The book promotes greater convergence of the methods used by economists, geographers and other social scientists working in this field. It will appeal to all social scientists and researchers interested in the geographical implications of social policies and will be a useful introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students to simulation methods in the social sciences."

  For more information, visit here.

  Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind, New ork: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  Controversial but thought-provoking readings in evolutionary psychology.

  William Barnett, Christophe Deissenberg, and Gustav Feichtinger (eds.), Economic Complexity: Non-Linear Dynamics, Multi-Agent Economies, and Learning, ISETE Volume 14, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2004.

  This book is the published proceedings of the COMPLEXITY2000 workshop held in Aix en Provence, France, May 4-6, 2000. The sixteen papers in this book - the fourteenth volume in the series International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics (ISETE) - reflect various perspectives on the sources of complex behavior in microeconomics and macroeconomics. Topics addressed include: chaotic dynamics and multiple equilibria; agent-based models; non-equilibrium macro-dynamics; information transmission; and learning mechanisms (e.g., genetic algorithms).

  William A. Barnett, Carl Chiarella, S. Keen, Robert Marks, and H. Schnabl (eds.), Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 422 pages, 2000, ISBN: 0-521-62030-9.

  From the publisher: "(This book) is a significant contribution to the new paradigm straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management, which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary systems, and must therefore be analyzed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display complicated behaviors that are to a significant degree generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. The papers in this volume consider a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behavior of single markets at the other."

  Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995, ISBN 0-262-52225-X.

  From the Book Blurb: "In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of `mindreading.' He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions. Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism suffer from `mindblindness' as a result of a selective impairment in mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things. Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, developmental psychology, and neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpet gazes as meaningful, and to decode `the language of the eyes.'

  Theodore C. Bergstrom and John H. Miller, Experiments with Economic Principles: Microeconomics, Second Edition, McGraw-Hill, 425 pp., August 1999. ISBN: 0-072-29518-X

  From the authors: "We got tired of it. Lecturing to sleepy students who want to `go over' material that they have already highlighted in their textbooks so that they can remember the `key ideas' until midterm. We wanted to engage our students in active learning, to exploit their natural curiosity about economic affairs, and to get them to ponder the questions before we try to give them answers. We found that conducting economic experiments in class, with discussions before, during, and after the experiments, was an effective way of getting students to use economics to think about the world around them. (This book) is the result of our efforts." The second edition provides classroom experiments on the following topics: Competitive markets; market intervention and public policy; imperfect Markets; firms and technology (including network externalities); and information, auctions, and bargaining.

  Theodore Bergstrom is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and John Miller is an Associate Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

  Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, May 2000, 288 pages, ISBN: 0-192-86212-X.

  From Scientific American: "Jokes, fads, rumors and many other things spread quickly and widely among people. How so? Zoologist Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, coined the word `meme' for the entity that might play the role of gene in the transmission of words, ideas, faiths, mannerisms, and fashions. It is not a physical entity, as far as anyone knows, but a characteristic trait of the human brain. ... (Memes) can pass vertically, as from parent to child, or -- unlike genes -- horizontally in peer groups and obliquely as from uncle to niece. Each of us is a meme machine. ... Blackmore carries the idea far, examining the role of memes in such phenomena as the evolution of the enormous human brain, the origins of language,... altruism, and the evolution of the Internet."

  Susan Blackmore is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West in England.

  Robert Boyd and P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.

  Thomas Brenner (ed.), Computational Techniques for Modelling Learning in Economics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, 408 pp., U.S.$150.00. ISBN 0-7923-8503-9.

  From the publisher: "(This book) offers a critical overview of the computational techniques that are frequently used for modelling learning in economics. It is a collection of papers, each of which focuses on a different way of modelling learning, including the techniques of evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming, neural networks, classifier systems, local interactions models, least squares learnings, Bayesian learning, boundedly rational models, and cognitive learning models."

  Thomas Brenner is with the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Jena, Germany.

  Martin V. Butz, Anticipatory Learning Classifier Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 200 pp., January 2002. ISBN: 0-792-37630-7

  From the publisher: "(This book) describes the state of the art of anticipatory learning classifier systems - adaptive rule learning systems that autonomously build anticipatory environmental models. An anticipatory model specifies all possible action-effects in an environment with respect to given situations. It can be used to simulate anticipatory adaptive behavior. ... (This book) gives a detailed algorithmic description as well as a program documentation of a C++ implementation of the system. It is an excellent reference for researchers interested in adaptive behavior and machine learning from a cognitive science perspective as well as those who are interested in combining evolutionary learning mechanisms for learning and optimization tasks."

  Martin Butz is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  R. Byrne, The Thinking Ape, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

  R. W. Bryne and A. Whiten (eds.), Machiavellian Intelligence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

  Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, Advances in Behavioral Economics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 776pp., 2003. The introductory chapter by Camerer and Loewenstein titled Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, Future is particularly recommended.

  Abstract (From the Publisher): "Twenty years ago, behavioral economics did not exist as a field. Most economists were deeply skeptical--even antagonistic--toward the idea of importing insights from psychology into their field. Today, behavioral economics has become virtually mainstream. It is well represented in prominent journals and top economics departments, and behavioral economists, including several contributors to this volume, have garnered some of the most prestigious awards in the profession. This book assembles the most important papers on behavioral economics published since around 1990. Among the 25 articles are many that update and extend earlier foundational contributions, as well as cutting-edge papers that break new theoretical and empirical ground. Advances in Behavioral Economics will serve as the definitive one-volume resource for those who want to familiarize themselves with the new field or keep up-to-date with the latest developments. It will not only be a core text for students, but will be consulted widely by professional economists, as well as psychologists and social scientists with an interest in how behavioral insights are being applied in economics. The articles, which follow Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein's introduction, are by the editors, George A. Akerlof, Linda Babcock, Shlomo Benartzi, Vincent P. Crawford, Peter Diamond, Ernst Fehr, Robert H. Frank, Shane Frederick, Simon Gächter, David Genesove, Itzhak Gilboa, Uri Gneezy, Robert M. Hutchens, Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, David Laibson, Christopher Mayer, Terrance Odean, Ted O'Donoghue, Aldo Rustichini, David Schmeidler, Klaus M. Schmidt, Eldar Shafir, Hersh M. Shefrin, Chris Starmer, Richard H. Thaler, Amos Tversky, and Janet L. Yellen."

  Colin F. Camerer is Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of "Behavioral Game Theory "(Princeton). George Loewenstein is Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Matthew Rabin, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economics Association for 2001.

  Angelo Cangelosi and Domenico Parisi (eds.), Simulating the Evolution of Language, Springer-Verlag, October 2001. ISBN: 1-852-33428-2.

  From the publisher: "This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the computational models and methodologies used for studying the origin and evolution of language and communication. With contributions from the most influential figures in the field, (this book) presents and summarises current computational approaches to language evolution and highlights new lines of development. Among the main discussion points are: analysis of emerging linguistic behaviours and structures; demonstration of the strict interaction and interdependence between language and other non-linguistic abilities; and direct comparisons between simulation studies and empirical research. Essential reading for researchers and students in the areas of evolutionary and adaptive systems, language evolution, modelling and linguistics, it will also be of particular interest to computer scientists working on multi-agent systems, robotics and Internet agents."

  Cristiano Castelfranchi and Yao-Hua Tan, eds., Trust and Deception in Virtual Societies, Kluwer Academic Publishers, May 2001, ISBN: 079236919X.

  From the publisher: "One of the major problems in the development of virtual societies, in particular in electronic commerce and computer-mediated interactions in organizations, is trust and deception. This book provides analyses by various researchers of the different types of trust that are needed for various tasks, such as facilitating on-line collaboration, building virtual communities and network organizations, and even the design of effective and user-friendly human-computer interfaces. The book has a multi-disciplinary character providing theoretical models of trust and deception, empirical studies, and practical solutions for creating trust in electronic commerce and multi-agent systems."

  William J. Clancey, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations (Learning by Doing), Cambridge University Press, 1997, $69.95 (hard cover, amazon.com). ISBN 0-521-44400-4

  From the publisher: "Situated Cognition focuses on recent changes in the design of intelligent machines. This book differs from other purely philosophical treatises in that Clancey - an insider who has built expert systems for twenty years - explores the limitations of existing computer programs and compares them to human memory and learning capabilities. Clancey examines the implications of situated action from the perspective of artificial intelligence specialists interested in building robots."

  Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, MIT Press, January 1998, 308 pp., ISBN 0-262-53156-9.

  From the book jacket: "Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought."

  Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University, Seattle.

  Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 240 pp., 2003. ISBN: 0-195-14866-5.

  From the publisher: "In (this book), Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants -- all exploit our brains' astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies. Drawing on his expertise in cognitive science, Clark demonstrates that our sense of self and of physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent... the line between the user and her tools grows thinner day by day."

  An interview with Andy Clark conducted by Natasha Mitchell (Radio National, Australia), which focuses on the issues raised in Natural Born Cyborgs, can be accessed at here.

  Andy Clark is Director of the Cognitive Science Program and Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University.

  David Colander (ed.), The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, June 2000, 328 pages, ISBN: 1-840-64252-1.

  From the publisher: "This ground-breaking book focuses on the implications of the complexity vision, such as that held by economists at the Santa Fe Institute, for the teaching of economics. ... It asks the question: how would the teaching of economics change if complexity is taken seriously? An outstanding group of contributors, including Brian Arthur, Buz Brock, and Duncan Foley, provide interesting and provocative answers to that question in a non-technical and highly accessible style."

  Rosaria Conte and Mario Paolucci, Reputation in Artificial Societies: Social Beliefs for Social Order, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, 222 pp., August 2002. ISBN 1-4020-7186-8

  From the publisher: "(This book) discusses the role of reputation in the achievement of social order. The book proposes that reputation is an agent property that results from transmission of beliefs about how the agents are evaluated with regard to a socially desirable conduct. This desirable conduct represents one or another of the solutions to the problem of social order and may consist of cooperation or altruism, reciprocity, or norm obedience. (The book) distinguishes between image (direct evaluation of others) and reputation (propagating meta-belief, indirectly acquired) and investigates their effects with regard to both natural and electronic societies. The interplay between image and reputation, the processes leading to them and the set of decisions that agents make on their basis are demonstrated with supporting data from agent-based simulations."

  Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, What is Evolutionary Psychology?: Explaining the New Science of the Mind, Yale University Press, December 2000, 64 pages, ISBN: 0-300-08309-2.

  Synopsis from Barnes&Noble.com: "The human mind, according to the exciting new discipline called evolutionary psychology, was designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this book, the two pioneers in the field explain evolutionary psychology, its main findings and conclusions, and its agenda for future research. They show how this powerful approach can change the way we look at reasoning, emotions, motivation, and other mysteries of human nature."

  Leda Cosmides, Professor of Psychology, and John Tooby, Professor of Anthropology, codirect the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  Kerstin Dautenhahn (ed.), Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Advances in Consciousness Research Series, 430 pages, 1999, ISBN: 1-556-19435-8.

  From the publisher: "(This book) presents state-of-the-art ideas, concepts, architectures and innovative implementations in an interdisciplinary field which links issues of human cognition with social agent technology. The book is written for readers who are curious about what human (social) cognition is, and whether and how advanced software programs or robots can become social agents. The book is suitable for students, researchers, and everyone interested in this emerging and quickly growing field, it does not require any specialist background knowledge. Topics addressed in 16 peer-reviewed chapters by researchers at the forefront of agent research include: Narrative intelligence and implementations of story-telling systems, socially situated avatars and 'conscious' software agents, cognitive architectures for socially intelligent agents, agents with emotions, design issues for interactive systems, artificial life agents, contributions to agent design from artistic practice, and a Cognitive Technology view on living with socially intelligent agents. The book addresses both software and robotic agents."

  Kerstin Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (Eds.), Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, The MIT Press, 612 pp., May 2002, ISBN: 0-262-04203-7.

  From the publisher: "The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals draws on fields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence, computer science, comparative psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and linguistics. This volume represents a first step toward integrating research from those studying imitation in humans and other animals, and those studying imitation through the construction of computer software and robots. Imitation is of particular importance in enabling robotic or software agents to share skills without the intervention of a programmer and in the more general context of interaction and collaboration between software agents and humans. Imitation provides way for the agent - whether biological or artificial - to establish a `social relationship' and learn about the demonstrator's actions, in order to include them in its own behavioral repertoire. Building robots and software agents that can imitate other artificial or human agents in an appropriate way involves complex problems of perception, experience, context, and action, solved in nature in various ways by animals that imitate."

  Herbert Dawid, Adaptive Learning by Genetic Algorithms: Analytical Results and Applications to Economic Models, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, No. 441, Springer, 1996. (Second Edition: 1999)

  Frans De Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, Basic Books, 448 pp., December 2001. ISBN: 0-465-04176-0

  From a review by Elizabeth Ziemska for Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.): Though evidence suggests that animals can teach skills to members of their group, appreciate aesthetics, and express sympathy, Western scientists are often reluctant to interpret such behavior in cultural terms, claims zoologist and ethologist de Waal. ... (The author) cites fascinating examples of animals acting in ways typically thought the exclusive purview of humans. ... Inspired by the work of Japanese primatologist Kinji Imanishi, whose cultural tradition emphasizes interconnectedness among living things, de Waal argues for an end to the West's anthropocentric bias in science."

  Frans de Waal is C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University and Director of the Living Link Center.

  Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Malcolm DeBevoise (translator), The Mechanization of the Mind, Princeton University Press, December 2000, ISBN:0-691-02574-6.

  From the publisher: "Jean-Pierre Dupuy, one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France, reconstructs the early days of the field here in a provocative and engaging combination of philosophy, science, and historical detective work."

  Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, where he directs the Applied Epistemology Research Center. He also holds a professorship at Stanford University and is a researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.

  Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (eds.), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, 384 pp., Oxford University Press, June 2005 (to appear). ISBN: 0-195-16258-7.

  This is the forthcoming third volume in the SFI series The Economy as an Evolving Complex System. Previous volumes appeared in 1988 and in 1997.

  Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics, The MIT Press, 234 pp., 2001. ISBN: 0-262-04186-3.

  From the publisher: "(This book) is based on the assumption that individuals are directly influenced by the choices and characteristics of others, creating a feedback loop from the past choices of some people to the current context and hence future choices of others. The essays in this book, by some of the creators of the field, provide an overview of social economics and represent a variety of approaches, including theoretical model building, empirical studies, statistical analyses, and philosophical reflections."

  Steven N. Durlauf is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin and former Director of the Economics Program of the Santa Fe Institute. H. Peyton Young is the Scott and Barbara Black Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.

  Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, MIT Press/Brookings, MA, 1996.

  This book applies agent-based computer modelling techniques to the study of human social phenomena, including trade, migration, group formation, combat, interaction with an environment, transmission of culture, propagation of disease, and population dynamics. For a review of this book, see L. Tesfatsion, "Review of J. M. Epstein and R. Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up" (pdf preprint), Journal of Economic Literature XXXVI (March 1998), pp. 233-234.

  J. Doyne Farmer and John Geanakoplos (eds.), Beyond Equilibrium and Efficiency, 352pp., Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-195-15094-5

  From the publisher: "This book presents recent thought on market efficiency, using a complex systems approach to move past equilibrium models and quantify the actual efficiency of markets. The older view that markets are perfectly efficient has come under attack from several different directions, including studies of market anomalies, human psychology, bounded rationality, agent-based modeling, and evolutionary game theory. This volume brings together some of the best economists, physicists, and biologists working on quantitative models of complex self-organized behavior relevant to measuring market efficiency, to stimulate new approaches to understanding financial markets."

  J. Doyne Farmer is McKinsey Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and John Geanakoplos is Professor of Economics at Yale University.

  Alexander J. Field, Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity, University of Michigan Press, 336 pp., November 2001. ISBN: 0-472-11224-4.

  From the publisher: "(This book) examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes; and the likelihood of modularity - domain-specific adaptations in our cognitive mechanisms and behavioral predispositions. Experimental research shows that people will often cooperate in one-shot prisoner's dilemma (PD) games and reject positive offers in ultimatum games, contradicting commonly accepted notions of rationality... (Field) argues that humans are born with the rudiments of a PD solution module - and differentially prepared to learn norms supportive of it. His emphasis on failure to harm, as opposed to the provision of affirmative assistance, as the empirically dominant form of altruistic behavior is also novel."

  Alexander J. Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at the Santa Clara University, California.

  M. Fisher, D. Gabbay, and L. Villa (eds.), Handbook of Temporal Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence, Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Handbook Series, Volume 1, Elsevier, the Netherlands, 2004. ISBN: 0-444-51493-7.

  With the ever-increasing processing power of computers, research in artificial intelligence has gained new vigor and prominence. In view of these developments, Elsevier has launched a handbook series in artificial intelligence, called Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, with general series editors J. M. Hendler (USA), H. Kitano (Japan), and B. Nebel (Germany). The plan is to publish approximately two volumes each year, with volume editors to be invited by the general series editors. The book by Fisher et al. is the first volume to appear in this series.

  John Foster, Evolutionary Macroeconomics, Unwin-Hyman, Boston, 1989.

  The author critiques past and current macro analysis, and proposes a framework for evolutionary macro foundations allowing for time-varying structure.

  S. A. Frank, Foundations of Social Evolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1998, ISBN 0-691-05934-9 (paper).

  From the publisher: "This is a masterly theoretical treatment of one of the central problems in evolutionary biology, the evolution of social coooperation and conflict. Steven Frank tackles the problem with a highly original combination of approaches: game theory, classical models of natural selection, quantitative genetics, and kin selection. He unites these with the best of economic theought: a clear theory of model formation and comparative statics, the development of simple methods for analyzing complex problems, and notions of information and rationality. Using this unique, multidisciplinary approach, Frank makes major advances in understanding the foundations of social evolution."

  Frank is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine.

  Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine, The Theory of Learning In Games, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998, ISBN 0-262-06194-5.

  From the publisher: "In economics...the traditional explanation for when and why equilibrium arises is that it results from analysis and introspection by the players in a situation where the rules of the game, the rationality of the players, and the players' payoff functions are all common knowledge ... In The Theory of Learning in Games, Drew Fudenberg and David Levine develop an alternative explanation that equilibrium arises as the long-run outcome of a process in which less than fully rational players grope for optimality over time. The models they explore provide a foundation for equilibrium theory and suggest useful ways for economists to evaluate and modify traditional equilibrium concepts."

  Richard J. Gaylord and Louis J. D'Andrea, Simulating Society: A Mathematica Toolkit for Modeling Socioeconomic Behavior, Springer-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 0-387-98532-8.

  From the foreward by Scott E. Page: "This book describes how to create, with minimal, often beautiful Mathematica code, computer models of complex human interactions involving agents (people) who follow changeable heuristics - rules of thumb - in their day-to-day behavior. The topics addressed in this book - movements, fads, norms, game playing, social networks, culture, and conformity - span traditional social scientific boundaries." Richard J. Gaylord is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Louis J. D'Andrea is a Mathematica programmer for Wolfam Research.

  Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten, eds., Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, The MIT Press, April 2001, 377 pp., ISBN:0-262-07214-9.

  The Eighty-Fourth Dahlem Workshop, focusing on Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, was held in Berlin during March 14-19, 1999. The basic theme of the workshop was that humans are boundedly rational beings who employ an "adaptive toolbox" consisting of fast and frugal heuristics.

  This edited volume consists of nineteen revised background papers and group reports reflecting the ideas, opinions, and contentious issues discussed by the Dahlem Workshop participants. According to the introductory chapter by the editors ("Rethinking Rationality"), the goal of the edited volume is to "(a) provide a framework of bounded rationality in terms of the metaphor of the adaptive toolbox, (b) to provide an understanding about why and when the simple heuristics in the adaptive toolbox work, (c) to extend the notion of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions, and (d) to extend the notion of bounded rationality to include social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools." Contributors to the volume include well-known researchers from cognitive science, economics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology.

  Gerd Gigerenzer is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Reinhard Selten is Professor at the University of Bonn and co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.

  Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, Oxford University Press, 1999, 416 pp., U.S.$35.00. ISBN 0-19-512156-2

  From the authors: "How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of rationality in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and an eternity in which to make choices. But to understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality. This book is about fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality."

  Additional information about this publication, including a table of contents, back-cover reviews by Nobel laureates Herbert Simon and Reinhard Selten, and links for ordering copies, can be obtained at the book web site. Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter Todd are both with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC), in Berlin. The ABC is directed by Gigerenzer.

  Nigel Gilbert and Klaus G. Troitzsch, Simulation for the Social Scientist, Open University Press, May 1999, 273 pp., ISBN 0-33-519744-2 (Paperback).

  From the publisher: "(This) is a practical textbook on the techniques of building computer simulations to help with understanding issues and problems in social science. Interest in social simulation has been growing very rapidly world-wide, as a result of increasingly powerful hardware and software, and rising interest in the application of ideas such as complexity, evolution, adaptation and chaos in the social sciences. This authoritative book outlines all the common approaches to simulation at a level of detail that gives social scientists an appreciation of the literature and allows those with some programming skills to create their own simulations."

  H. Randy Gimblett (ed.), Integrating Geographic Information Systems and Agent-Based Modeling Techniques for Simulating Social and Ecological Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 344 pp., Spring 2002. ISBN: 0-195-14336-1.

  From the publisher: "For those addressing ecological and natural resource management problems, this volume presents a set of coherent, cross-referenced perspectives on incorporating the spatial representation and analytical power of (geographic information systems) with agent-based modeling of evolutionary and non-linear processes and phenomena. Many recent advances in software algorithms for incorporating geographic data in modeling social and ecological behaviors and also the success in applying such algorithms have not been adequately represented in the present literature. This book fills that gap and provides much needed information on applications for the research community as well as those in the management of natural resources."

  E. N. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  Mauro F. Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer (eds.), The New Economic Sociology, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, N.Y., 344 pp., May 2002. ISBN 0-871-54343-5

  From the Publisher: "As the American economy surged in the 1990s, economic sociology made great strides as well. Economists and sociologists worked across disciplinary boundaries to study the booming market as both a product and a producer of culture, tracing the correlations they saw between economic and social phenomena. In the process, they debated the methodological issues that arose from their interdisciplinary perspectives. (This book) provides an overview of these debates and assesses the state of the burgeoning discipline. The contributors summarize economic sociology's accomplishments to date, identifying key theoretical problems and opportunities, and formulating strategies for future research in the field... The contributors concur that economic action must be interpreted through the cultural understandings that lend it stability and meaning. By rendering these often complex debates accessible, (this book) makes a significant contribution to this still rapidly developing field, and provides a useful guide for future avenues of research."

  Mauro F. Guillen is Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Randall Collins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Paula England is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Marshall Meyer is Professor of Management and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Peter Hammerstein (ed.), Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, The MIT Press, 450 pp., 2003, ISBN: 0-262-08326-4.

  From the publisher: "Current thinking in evolutionary biology holds that competition among individuals is the key to understanding natural selection. When competition exists, it is obvious that conflict arises; the emergence of cooperation, however, is less straightforward and calls for in-depth analysis. Much research is now focused on defining and expanding the evolutionary models of cooperation. Understanding the mechanisms of cooperation has relevance for fields other than biology. Anthropology, economics, mathematics, political science, primatology, and psychology are adopting the evolutionary approach and developing analogies based on it. Similarly, biologists use elements of economic game theory and analyze cooperation in `evolutionary games.' Despite this, exchanges between researchers in these disciplines have been limited. Seeking to fill this gap, the 90th Dahlem Workshop was convened. This book, which grew out of that meeting,... makes a significant contribution to a growing process of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization."

  Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp (eds.), Social Norms, Russell Sage Foundation, 456 pp., March 2001. ISBN: 0-871-54354-0

  From a book jacket comment by Robert Axelrod (Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor): "(This book) is a major contribution to our understanding of how norms emerge. The essays in this volume probe deeply into the regularities and ambiguities of norms about everything from monogamy to national self-determination."

  Michael Hechter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Karl-Dieter Opp is Professor of Sociology at the University of Leipzig, Germany.

  L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  Jack Hirshleifer, Economic Behavior in Adversity, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987. [Especially Part II: Cooperation and Conflict]

  John H. Holland, "The Global Economy as an Adaptive Process," pp. 117-124 in P. W. Anderson et al., op. cit..

  This article includes a brief summary of work on the Echo Model, a model of an evolving ecology in which agents engage in a variety of activities such as self-maintenance (consumption), trade, competition, and reproduction.

  John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, California, 1998, ISBN 0-201-14943-5.

  The basic objective of this book is to characterize the conditions for emergence and in this way provide a definition for the term. An extensive review of this book by Tony Curzon Price (University College London) appears in Volume 1, Issue 4, of the online Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), available at the JASSS Web site.

  John H. Holland and John Miller, "Artificial Adaptive Agents in Economic Theory," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 81 (1991), pp. 365-370.

  The authors stress the need for endogenous learning and learning-to-learn mechanisms in socio-economic modelling as opposed to rational expectations assumptions.

  Bernard Huberman and Tod Hogg, "Distributed Computation as an Economic System", Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (Winter 1995), pp. 141-152).

  Marco A. Janssen (ed.), Complexity and Ecosystem Management: The Theory and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, Edward Elgar, 360 pp., December 2002. ISBN 1-843-76061-4

  From the publisher: "The quality of ecosystems is affected by the actions of different stakeholders who use them in a variety of ways. In order to understand this complex relationship between humans and nature, it is vital to understand the complexity of the interacting agents. The authors in this book attempt to do this by applying multi-agent systems to the problems of ecosystem management. The multi-agent approach to ecosystem management is a relatively new and rapidly developing field which takes a formal computational approach towards the interaction of humans and their environment. The authors highlight some of the promising new methodologies which are emerging in the field from disciplines such as computer science and computational social science. They move on to address a number of important topics including diffusion processes, common-pool resources, land use change and the participatory use of models, in an attempt to solve contemporary management issues. They demonstrate the potential utility of multi-agent systems in the context of theoretical problems and practical case studies."

  Marco A. Janssen is Associate Research Scientist, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner, 288 pp., September 2001. ISBN: 0-684-86875-X.

  From the publisher: "Drawing upon evolutionary theory, urban studies, neuroscience, and computer games, Emergence is a guidebook to one of the key components of twenty-first-century culture. Until recently, Johnson explains, the disparate philosophers of emergence have worked to interpret the world. But today they are starting to change it. This book is the riveting story of that change and what it means for the future. If you've searched for information on the Web, played a recent video game, or accepted a collect call using voice recognition software, you've already encountered the new world of artificial emergence. Provocative, engaging, and sophisticated, Emergence puts you on the front lines of a sweeping revolution in science and thought."

  Michael I. Jordan (ed.), Learning in Graphical Models, MIT Press, Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series, 1999, 648 pp., $50.00 (paper). ISBN 0-262-60032-3

  From the publisher: "This book presents an in-depth exploration of issues related to learning within the graphical model formalism. Four chapters are tutorial chapters: Robert Cowell on Inference for Bayesian Networks; David MacKay on Monte Carlo Methods; Michael I. Jordan et al. on Variational Methods; and David Heckerman on Learning with Bayesian Networks. The remaining chapters cover a wide range of topics of current research interest."

  Kenneth L. Judd, Numerical Methods in Economics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, c. 1998, 622 pp., ISBN 0-262-10071-1.

  From the publisher: "Advances in computer technology and computational methods have made possible serious empirical analysis of large data sets, as well as the application of computer-intensive statistical methods. In order to harness the full power of this technology, economists need to understand and use a broad range of mathematical techniques. In this new text, Kenneth Judd introduces students to critically important numerical methods and shows how to use them in economic analyses."

  Chapter topics include: basic numerical analysis on Euclidean n-space; numerical methods for functional problems; perturbation methods; and applications to dynamic equilibrium analysis. A web site for the Judd text. provides various supporting materials.

  Judd is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University.

  James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi, Swarm Intelligence: Collective Adaptation, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, March 2001, 544 pp., ISBN 1-558-60595-9

  From an Amazon.com Editorial Review: "Traditional methods for creating intelligent computational systems have privileged private `internal' cognitive and computational processes. In contrast, (this book) argues that human intelligence derives from the interactions of individuals in a social world and further, that this model of intelligence can be effectively applied to artificially intelligent systems."

  Timothy A. Kohler and George J. Gumerman (eds.), Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Oxford University Press, 2000, 416 pages, ISBN (paper): 0-19-513168-1.

  From the publisher: "(This) book presents the most up-to-date research in the study of human and primate societies, presenting recent advances in software and algorithms for modeling societies. It also addresses case studies that have applied agent-based modeling approaches in archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, and sociology. Many things set this book apart from any other on modeling in the social sciences, including the emphasis on small-scale societies and the attempts to maximize realism in modeling efforts applied to social problems and questions. It is an ideal book for professionals in archaeology or cultural anthropology as well as a valuable tool for those studying primatology or computer science."

  Timothy A. Kohler is at the Washington State University and George J. Gumerman is at the University of Arizona.

  Ken Kollman, John H. Miller, and Scott Page (eds.), Computational Models in Political Economy, The MIT Press, 320 pp., 2003, ISBN: 0-262-11275-2.

  From the publisher: "Researchers are increasingly turning to computational methods to study the dynamic properties of political and economic systems. Politicians, citizens, interest groups, and organizations interact in dynamic, complex environments, and the static models that are predominant in political economy are limited in capturing fundamental features of economic decision making in modern democracies. Computational models -- numerical approximations of equilibria and dynamics that cannot be solved analytically -- provide useful insight into the behavior of economic agents and the aggregate properties of political systems... This book offers some of the latest research on computational political economy. The focus is on theoretical models of traditional problems in the field."

  Ken Kollman is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan. John H. Miller is Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, and Research Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Scott Page is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director, Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan.

  Sarit Kraus, Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments, The MIT Press, 280 pp., September 1, 2001, ISBN: 0-262-11264-7.

  From the publisher: "Sarit Kraus is concerned here with the cooperation and coordination of intelligent agents that are self-interested and usually owned by different individuals or organizations. Conflicts frequently arise, and negotiation is one of the main mechanisms for reaching agreement. Kraus presents a strategic-negotiation model that enables autonomous agents to reach mutually beneficial agreements efficiently in complex environments. The model, which integrates game theory, economic techniques, and heuristic methods of artificial intelligence, can be automated in computer systems or applied to human situations. The book provides both theoretical and experimental results."

  Sarit Kraus is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Professor of Computer Scinece in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

  Roland H. Lamberson (ed.), Natural Resource Modeling: Special Issue on Individual-Based Models, The Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium, Volume 15, Number 1, March 2002.

  This special issue is based on the symposium "Advancing the Individual-Based Modeling Approach: New Tools and Concepts," at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Snowbird, Utah, August 10, 2000. The goal of the volume is to reconsider the status of individual-based models, present some promising new approaches, and give some examples of successful new models. For more information about this volume, visit here.

  Roberto Leombruni and Matteo Richiardi (eds.), Industry and Labor Dynamics: The Agent-Based Computational Economics Approach, World Scientific Publishing Co., 432pp., November 2004, ISBN: 9-812-56101-3.

  Abstract: This book is the published proceedings of the WILD@ACE 2003 Workshop held in Torino, Italy, 3-4 October 2003. The acronym "WILD@ACE" stands for "Workshop on Industrial and Labor Dynamics: The Agent-Based Computational Economics Approach." The workshop focused on the potential use of agent-based simulation for the investigation of labor economics and industrial organization issues. The book includes a selection of contributed papers on methodology, microsimulation of labor dynamics, firm behavior, and industrial clusters and firm interaction. For more information, visit here.

  Haim Levy, Moshe Levy, and Sorin Solomon, Microscopic Simulation of Financial Markets, Academic Press, 2000, 300 pages, ISBN: 0-124-45890-4.

  From the publisher: "By using Microscopic Simulation, a methodology originally developed by physicists for the investigation of complex systems, the authors are able to relax classical assumptions about investor behavior and to model it as empirically and experimentally observed. This rounded and judicious introduction to the application of MS in finance and economics reveals that many of the empirically-observed `puzzles' in finance can be explained by investors' quasi-rationality."

  The authors are with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Israel.

  Zhiang Lin and Kathleen M. Carley, Designing Stress Resistant Organizations: Computational Theorizing and Crisis Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 240 pp., April 2003. ISBN: 1-4020-7436-0

  From the publisher: "(This book) demonstrates, in a persuasive way, how computational organization theory can be applied to advance the field of management with its successful integration of theory and practice. At the theoretical level, the book contains a comprehensive computational framework called DYCORP, which simulates dynamic and interactive organizational behaviors by incorporating multiple factors such as organizational design, task environment, and stress, and which generates consistent and insightful propositions on organizational performance.... At the empirical level, this book describes an in-depth, though exploratory, analysis of sixty-nine organizational cases in the corporate world collected from multiple sources, which can provide contrast with and shed insight into the computational framework."

  Zhiang (John) Lin is with the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, and Kathleen Carley is with the Institute for Software Research International, School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  Alessandro Lomi and Erik R. Larsen (eds.), Dynamics of Organizations: Computational Modeling and Organizational Theories, AAAI Press, 352 pp., 2001. ISBN: 0-262-62152-5.

  From the publisher: "An organization is more than the sum of its parts, and the individual components that function as a complex social system can be understood only by analyzing their collective behavior. This book shows how state-of-the-art simulation methods, including genetic algorithms, neural networks, and cellular automata, can be brought to bear on central problems of organizational theory related to the emergence, permanence, and dissolution of hierarchical macrostructures. The emphasis is on the application of a new generation of equation- and agent-based computational models that can help students of organizations to reformulate their basic research questions starting from assumptions about how to link - rather than separate - different levels of organizational analysis."

  Alessandro Lomi is Professor of Organizational Theory and Behavior at the School of Economics, University of Bologna. Erik R. Larsen is Professor of Management at City University Business School, London.

  Francesco Luna and Alessandro Perrone (eds.), Agent-Based Methods in Economics and Finance: Simulations in Swarm, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 344 pp., October 2001. ISBN: 0-792-37419-3.

  From the publisher: "Swarm's principal foundation is an object-oriented representation of active agents interacting among themselves and with their environment. To this base layer it adds its own structures to drive, record and portrait the events that occur across this world. The specific contents of any world, however, are up to the experimenter to provide, either by building them from scratch or by tapping previous contributions. This book (assembles) a rich array of such contributions, which are significant in their own right, but which can also be mined to extract the reusable elements in their respective areas of finance and economics. It also presents three interesting software additions with tutorials in the form of simple financial and economic applications: a Swarm meta-language closer to a `natural language'; the use of Internet-augmented Swarm for experimental economics; and a Swarm visual builder..."

  Michael Macy, "Social Order in Artificial Worlds", Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Volume 1, Number 1, 3 January 1998 (on-line publication).

  Advocates rule-based evolutionary models as a promising way to formalize the process by which the habits of association generate unthinking compliance with social norms among autonomous but interdependent agents.

  Roger A. McCain, Agent-Based Computer Simulation of Dichotomous Economic Growth, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Volume 13, Advances in Computational Economics, due out in early 2000, ISBN 0-7923-8688-4

  From the author: "This book is an attempt to explain dichotomous economic growth by means of comparative computer simulation. Agents are distributed in space, and allocate resources by rules that are determined by boundedly rational learning. Space is simulated by a Cellular Automaton or Boolean Network and imitative learning is simulated by a more or less modified Genetic Algorithm. Within that framework, a substantial range of growth and learning models are simulated and compared, with the result that models in which learning is limited to nearby neighbors generate dichotomous growth, with lagging and leading regions, while other simulations do not. The simulations are supported by a chapter-length survey of consensus modern economic growth theory, a chapter-length bibliometric survey and cognitive theory of learning by doing, and a simulation model of an exchange economy without an auctioneer."

  Roger A. McCain is with the Department of Economics and International Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.

  Drew V. McDermott, Mind and Mechanism, MIT Press, 280 pp., October 2001. ISBN: 0-262-13392-X.

  From an Amazon.com Editorial Review: "Drew McDermott takes a computational approach to the mind-body problem (how it is that a purely physical entity, the brain, can have experiences). He begins by demonstrating the falseness of dualist approaches, which separate the physical and mental realms. He then surveys what has been accomplished in artificial intelligence, clearly differentiating what we know how to build from what we can imagine building. McDermott then details a computational theory of consciousness - claiming that the mind can be modeled entirely in terms of computation - and deals with various possible objections. He also discusses cultural consequences of the theory, including its impact on religion and ethics."

  A. Meystel (ed.), Intelligent Systems: A Semiotic Perspective, National Institute for Standards and Technology, 1996.

  Scott Moss and John Rae, eds. Artificial Intelligence and Economic Analysis, Edward Elgar, Vermont, 1992.

  Monty Newborn, Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone, Springer, 368 pp., 2003. ISBN: 0-387-95461-9.

  From the publisher: "This work provides a comprehensive and authoritative account of the creation, development, and actions of IBM's Deep Blue technology group and how their computer defeated the world chess champion. Specialists and nonspecialists in AI and computing will discover a fascinating story of one of the major technological milestones in the history of computer science, as well as science in general."

  Monty Newborn is at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

  Bart Nooteboom, Learning and Innovation in Organizations and Economies, Oxford University Press, 2000, 343 pages, ISBN: 0-199-124099-X.

  From the Author: "This book seeks to develop a heuristic of discovery. How does novelty arise, and how can it arise in such a way that exploitation and exploration can be combined? An attempt is also made to connect the levels of individual learning, organizational learning, and innovation in industries or `innovation systems.' Building blocks for this endeavor are sought in economics, sociology, and cognitive science."

  Barte Nooteboom is with the Rotterdam School of Management at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

  Paul Ormerod, Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior, Basic Books, 250 pp., January 2001, ISBN: 0-465-05256-4.

  From the publisher: "A beautifully written and engaging look at the cutting edge where economics meets complexity theory. In this cogently and elegantly argued analysis of why human beings persist in engaging in behavior that defies time-honored economic theory, Ormerod also explains why governments and industries throughout the world must completely reconfigure their traditional methods of economic forecasting if they are to succeed and prosper in an increasingly complicated global marketplace."

  Paul Ormerod has been head of the Economic Assessment Unit at The Economist and a visiting professor at the Universities of London and Manchester. He lives in London.

  Raja Parasuraman (ed.), The Attentive Brain, MIT Press, September 2000, 604 pp., ISBN 0-262-66112-8.

  From the publisher: "A central thesis of this book on the cognitive neuroscience of attention is that attention is not a single entity, but a finite set of brain processes that interact mutually and with other brain processes in the performance of perceputal, cognitive, and motor skills.... Part II describes the major neuroscience methods and the computational modeling of attention. Part III looks at three major components of attention from the cognitive neuroscience perspective: selection, vigilance, and control. Finally, Part IV discussion the application of the findings from the previous sections to the analysis of normal and abnormal development and to pathologies of attention such as schizophrenia and attention deficit disorders."

  Raja Parasuraman is Professor of Psychology at the Catholic University of America.

  Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Cambridge University Press, 384pp., March 2001.

  From the publisher: "Written by one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation. It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions, and observations."

  Professor Judea Pearl is with the Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.

  Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier, Understanding Intelligence, MIT Press, August 1999, 700 pages, ISBN: 0-262-16181-8.

  From a review by Dimitrios Lambrinos: "Researchers now agree that intelligence always manifests itself in behavior - thus it is behavior that we must understand. An exciting new field has grown around the study of behavior: behavior-based artificial intelligence, also known as embodied cognitive science, or `new AI.' This book provides a systematic introduction to this new way of thinking. After discussing concepts and approaches such as subsumption architecture, Braitenberg vehicles, evolutionary robots, artificial life, self-organization, and learning, the authors derive a set of principles and a coherent framework for the study of naturally and artificially intelligent systems, or autonomous agents. This framework is based on a synthetic methodology whose goal is understanding by designing and building."

  Michael Prietula, Kathleen Carley, and Les Gasser, Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups, MIT Press, 1998.

  From the publisher: "Although a great deal of work remains to be done, the era is approaching when both theorists and practitioners will routinely state theories, design organizations, and derive their implications using widely shared computational tools. This volume brings together a range of work from many of the leading researchers in the field."

  Stephen J. Read and Lynn C. Miller (eds.), Connectionist Models of Social Reasoning and Social Behavior, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahway, New Jersey, 1998, ISBN 0-8058-2216-X.

  This collection of readings focuses on a variety of topics related to the connectionist modelling of social systems, e.g., why connectionist models provide useful tools for interpreting the experimental findings of social psychology. Deborah Vakas-Duong (Agent-Based Learning Systems, Annandale, Virginia) provides a detailed critique of this book in particular and the epistemology of social simulation in general in Volume 1, Issue 4, of the online Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), available at the JASSS Web site..

  Ariel Rubinstein, Modeling Bounded Rationality, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998, ISBN 0-262-681005.

  From the publisher: "In this book, Ariel Rubinstein...focuses on the challenges of modeling bounded rationality, rather than on substantial economic implications. In the first part of the book, the author considers the modeling of choice. ... In the second part, he discusses the fundamental difficulties of modeling bounded rationality in games. ... The final chapter includes a critique by Herbert Simon of the author's methodology and the author's response."

  Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, Second Edition, New York, N.Y., 1132 pp., December 2002. ISBN 0-137-90395-2.

  From Stuart Russell (author): "Every chapter (of the second edition of our book) has been extensively rewritten. Significant new material has been introduced to cover areas such as constraint satisfaction, fast propositional inference, planning graphs, internet agents, exact probabilistic inference, Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques, Kalman filters, ensemble learning methods, statistical learning, probabilistic natural language models, probabilistic robotics, and ethical aspects of AI."

  Thomas Sargent, Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics, Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1993.

  Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macro Behavior, Norton, N.Y., 1978.

  From the publisher: "Through familiar and readily grasped examples, Professor Schelling demonstrates what happens when behavior in the aggregate is more than a simple summation of individual behaviors, how members of a society tend to be blind to the collective consequences of their separate decisions, and why attempts to infer individual intentions from group phenomena are tricky at best and often downright impossible."

  Bernhard Schölkopf and Alex Smola, Learning with Kernels: Support Vector Machines, Regularization, Optimization, and Beyond, The MIT Press, 644 pp., December 2001. ISBN: 0-262-19457-9.

  From the publisher: "In the 1990s, a new type of learning algorithm was developed, based on results from statistical learning theory: the Support Vector Machine (SVM). This gave rise to a new class of theoretically elegant learning machines that use a central concept of SVMs - kernels - for a number of learning tasks. Kernel machines provide a modular framework that can be adapted to different tasks and domains by the choice of the kernel function and the base algorithm. They are replacing neural networks in a variety of fields, including engineering, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. (This book) provides an introduction to SVMs and related kernel methods. Although the book begins with the basics, it also includes the latest research. It provides all of the concepts necessary to enable a reader equipped with some basic mathematical knowledge to enter the world of machine learning using theoretically well-founded yet easy-to-use kernel algorithms and to understand and apply the powerful algorithms that have been developed over the last few years."

  The book is accompanied by a Book Resource Site that provides information, errata, presentation slides, and links to approximately one third of the chapters for free downloading (including Chapter 1: Tutorial Introduction).

  Bernhard Schölkopf is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and Professor at the Technical University in Berlin. Alexander J. Smola is Leader of the Machine Learning Group, Research School for Information Sciences and Engineering, the Australian National University.

  Frank Schweitzer and Gerald Silverberg (eds.), Evolution and Self-Organization in Economics, Duncker and Humblot, Berlin, 1998, ISBN 3-428-09608-8.

  From the editors: "(This book) includes (among others) review articles about modelling complex economic evolution, especially with respect to simulation methodology and agent-based computational economics models."

  A complete table of contents for the book can be found at a web site for the book. maintained by the first author. Schweitzer is currently at the Institute of Physics, Humboldt University, Berlin. Silverberg is at MERIT, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

  Frank Schweitzer (ed.), Self-Organization of Complex Structures: From Individual to Collective Dynamics, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, c. 1997, 596 pp., ISBN: 90-5699-027-6.

  From the editor: "The collection of articles found in (this) book aims to link the discussion about complex phenomena in natural sciences, such as physics and biology, to those in life sciences, such as sociology, economics, and regional planning. The book contains a wide range of applications in the evolving field of self-organization and complexity theory..."

  A complete table of contents for the book can be found at a web site for the book." maintained by the first author. Schweitzer is currently at the Institute of Physics, Humboldt University, Berlin.

  Esther-Mirjam Sent, The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations: An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements, Cambridge University Press, November 1998, ISBN: 0-521-57164-2.

  From a review by D. Wade Hands: "Sent's book is like no other work in the history of economic thought. The subject matter is contemporary macroeconomic theory, and the dominant themes are symmetry, reflexivity, and the interest-ladenness of scientific theory. It is a fascinating story: provocative as well as compelling."

  Esther-Mirjam Sent is with the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

  Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Networked Economy, Harvard Business School Press, November 1998, 352 pp., ISBN 0-8758-5863-X.

  The authors consider how to market and distribute goods in the networked economy, with examples drawn from a wide array of industries (airlines, software, entertainment, communications,...). Issues covered include pricing, intellectual property , versioning, lock-in, compatibility, and standards. From the Economist, December 12, 1998: "If you want to understand how the networked economy really functions and why some companies succeed spectacularly ... (while others fail) despite having mould-breaking technology, look no further."

  Carl Shapiro is Professor of Business Strategy at the Haas School of Business and Hal Varian is the Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems, both at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Yuichi Shionoya, Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science, Cambridge University Press, c. 1997, 368 pp., ISBN: 0-521-43034-8 (hardcover).

  From the publisher: "This book provides a unified and comprehensive analysis of the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950), the world-famed economist ranked with John Maynard Keynes. Although Schumpeter is well known for his work on economic development and innovation, his aim to construct a universal social science addresing the evolution of mind and society is usually ignored. A major contribution to the history of economic thought, this book will be the standard of Schumpeter scholarship for years to come."

  Yuichi Shionoya is with the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Tokyo, Japan.

  Herbert A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality, Volume 3: Empirically Grounded Economic Reason, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, c. 1997, 336 pp., ISBN: 0-262-19372-8.

  From the publisher: "Throughout Herbert Simon's wide-ranging career his central aim has been to explain the nature of the thought processes that people use in making decisions. The third volume of Simon's collected papers ... (brings) together work on this and other economics-related topics that have occupied his attention in the 1980s and 1990s: how to represent causal ordering formally in dynamic systems, the implications for society of new electronic information systems, employee and managerial motivation in the business firm (specifically the implications for economics of the propensity of human beings to identify with the goals of the organization), and the state of economics itself."

  Larry R. Squire and Stephen M. Kosslyn, editors, Findings and Current Opinion in Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT Press, c. 1998, 392 pp., ISBN: 0-262-69204-X (paper).

  From the publisher: "Cognitive neuroscience has undergone explosive growth in the past ten years. New brain-imaging technologies have allowed researchers to address questions that until recently remained in the realm of mere speculation. Moreover, better computers and new theories have led to more detailed models of neural function. These developments have made it possible to link perception, attention, memory, and other aspects of cognition to neurobiology."

  "Because researchers come to cognitive neuroscience from a variety of fields, researchers and students alike find it difficult to ascertain the core literature. This volume, which contains forty-six review articles from recent issues of Current Opinion in Neurobiology, provides easy access to the current state of theory and findings in the field. The book is organized into five sections: Perception and Attention, Neuronal Plasticity and Memory, Cognition, The Organization of Action, and Development and Structure. The articles contain bibliographies to enable the reader to pursue individual topics in greater depth."

  J. E. R. Staddon, Adaptive Dynamics: The Theoretical Analysis of Behavior, The MIT Press, A Bradford Book, May 2001, 420 pages, ISBN: 0-262-19453-8.

  From the publisher: "In this book J. E. R. Staddon proposes an explanation of behavior that lies between cognitive psychology, which seeks to explain it in terms of mentalistic constructs, and cognitive neuroscience, which tries to explain it in terms of the brain. Staddon suggests a new way to understand the laws and causes of learning, based on the invention, comparison, testing, and modification or rejection of parsimonious real-time models of behavior. The models are neither physiological nor cognitive: they are behavioristic. Staddon shows how simple dynamic models can explain a surprising variety of animal and human behavior, ranging from simple orientation, reflexes, and habituation through feeding regulation, operant conditioning, spatial navigation, stimulus generalization, and interval timing."

  J. E. R. Staddon is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Zoology and Neurobiology at Duke University.

  Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, MIT Press, March 1998, 380 pages, ISBN: 0-262-19398-1.

  From the Authors: "Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In this book, we provide an explanation of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. The discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications."

  Richard S. Sutton is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science, and Andrew G. Barto is Professor of Computer Science, both at the University of Massachusetts.

  Takao Terano, Hiroshi Deguchi, and Keiki Takadama (eds.), Meeting the Challenge of Social Problems via Agent-Based Simulation, Post-Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Agent-Based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems (AESCS), Springer, Tokyo, 200 pp., 2003. ISBN: 4-431-00830-6.

  This volume contains a selection of papers contributed to the second AESCS workshop together with invited papers by Robert Axtell, Shu-Heng Chen, and Takao Terano. These papers focus on the importance of cumulative progress in agent-based simulation in the social sciences through discussions of common tasks, standard computational models, replication and validation issues, and evaluation and verification criteria for the results.

  Takao Terano is a Professor at the Graduate School of Systems Management, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo. Hiroshi Deguchi and Keiki Takadama are Professor and Lecturer, respectively, in the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan.

  Leigh Tesfatsion (Guest Editor), Special Double Issue on Agent-Based Comptutational Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Volume 25, Issue Nos. 3-4, March 2001, pages 281-654.

  Leigh Tesfatsion (Guest Editor), Special Issue on Agent-Based Computational Economics, Computational Economics, Volume 18, Issue No. 1, August 2001, pages 1-135.

  Leigh Tesfatsion (Guest Editor), Special Issue on Agent-Based Modeling of Evolutionary Computational Economics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Volume 5, Issue Number 5, October 2001, pages 437-560.

  Leigh Tesfatsion and Kenneth L. Judd (eds.), Handbook of Computational Economics, Volume 2: Agent-Based Computational Economics, Table of Contents (html) and Preface (pdf), Handbooks in Economics Series, North-Holland, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Spring 2006, to appear.

  Abstract: This handbook comprises 16 chapters surveying agent-based computational economics research, 6 shorter essays providing personal perspectives, and a "getting started" guide for newcomers to agent-based modeling in the social sciences. Research topics covered include: an introduction to agent-based computational economics; computationally-intensive analyses in economics; learning representations for computational agents; agent-based models and human-subject experiments; economic activity on fixed networks; endogenous formation of economic networks; social dynamics and the evolution of norms; heterogenous agent modeling in economics and finance; agent-based computational finance; agent-based models of innovation and technological change; agent-based models of organizations; agent-based market design; automated markets and trading agents; agent-based computational methods and models of politics; agent-based tools for exploring the governance of social-ecological systems; and computational laboratories for spatial agent-based modeling.

  Paul Thagard, ed., Mind Readings, MIT Press, 1998, 360 pp., $20.00 (paper). ISBN: 0-262-70067-0

  From the publisher: "Mind Readings is a collection of accessible readings of some of the most important topics in cognitive science. ... The selections (are) all less than a decade old ... The first eight chapters present approaches to cognitive science from the perspective that thinking consists of computational procedures on mental representations. The remaining five chapters discuss challenges to the computational-representation understanding of mind."

  Richard H. Thaler (Ed.), Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II, Princeton University Press, NJ, 744pp. 2005.

  Abstract (From the Publisher): (This volume) constitutes the essential new resource in the field. It presents twenty recent papers by leading specialists that illustrate the abiding power of behavioral finance -- of how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. As with the first volume,it reaches beyond the world of finance to suggest, powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioural approaches to other areas of economic life."

  Richard H. Thaler is Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.

  Robert Trappl and Paolo Petta (eds.), Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors: Towards Autonomous Personality Agents, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1997, ISBN 3-540-62735-9.

  This collection of readings is devoted to the implementation and study of personality and character traits in synthetic actors. Applications range from animations for entertainment to systematic attempts to understand the origins and functions of sentiment and emotion in humans. A critical review of this book by Rosaria Conte (IP/CNR, Rome) appears in Volume 1, Issue 4 of the online Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), available at the JASSS Web site..

  Geoffrey Underwood and Richard L. Gregory (eds.), Oxford Guide to the Mind, Oxford University Press, 416 pp., April 2001, ISBN: 0-198-60083-6.

  This volume consists of a selection of articles from the much more comprehensive collection, Oxford Companion to the Mind. These selected articles cover the following topics: the software of the mind; the hardware of the mind; brain, mind and consciousness; when minds are damaged; disturbed minds; and minds in action.

  Gerhard Weiss (ed.), Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, June 1999, 619 pp., ISBN 0-26-223203-0.

  From the publisher: "This is the first comprehensive introduction to multiagent systems and contemporary distributed artificial intelligence that is suitable as a textbook. The book provides detailed coverage of basic topics as well as several closely related ones. Unlike traditional textbooks, the book brings together many leading experts, guaranteeing a broad and diverse base of knowledge and expertise. It emphasizes aspects of both theory and application, and provides many illustrations and examples. Also included are thought-provoking exercises of varying degrees of difficulty and a twenty-page glossary of terms found in the study of agents, multiagent systems, and distributed artificial intelligence."

  Ulrich Witt, The Evolving Economy: Essays on the Evolutionary Approach to Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 416 pp., 2003. ISBN: 1-840-64748-5.

  From the author: "If we have difficulties in economics with making sense of the evolutionary character of our economy, the reason is not in the historical record. The statistics and even our own casual experience do not fail to show us that economic life is changing tremendously. What hampers the understanding is the lack in economic theory of the proper heuristic frames, of concepts and material conjectures by which the hundreds and thousands of years of incessant economic transformations can be put into perspective. The work in this book is therefore not empirical and descriptive. Rather it is concerned with conceptual and methodological problems that need to be solved on the way to a theory of evolution in the economy."

  Ulrich Witt is Professor of Economics and Director, Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Jena, Germany.

  Michael Wooldridge, Reasoning About Rational Agents, MIT Press, July 2000, 240 pages, ISBN 0-262-23213-8.

  From the publisher: "One goal of modern computer science is to engineer computer programs that can act as autonomous, rational agents; software that can independently make good decisions about what actions to perform on our behalf and execute those actions. Applications range from small programs that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commmerce, to autonomous space probes. This book focues on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of rational agents, which recognizes the primacy of beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational action. The BDI model has three distinct strengths: an underlying philosophy based on practical reasoning in humans, a software architecture that is implementable in real systems, and a family of logics that support a formal theory of rational agency."

  John Ziman (ed.), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, Cambridge University Press, 398 pages, March 2000, ISBN: 0-521-62361-8.

  From the publisher: "Technological artifacts and biological organisms `evolve' by very similar processes of blind variation and selective retention. This analogy is explored systematically, for the first time, by a team of experts from evolutionary biology, history and sociology of science and technology, cognitive and computer science, economics, psychology, education, cultural anthropology and research management. ... By its practical demonstration of the explanatory potential of `evolutionary reasoning' in a well-defined context, this book is a ground-breaking contribution to every discipline concerned with cultural change."

B. Game Theory Approaches to Social Evolution

• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, N.Y., 1984. [Classic seminal study.]

• R. Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Conflict and Cooperation (html), Princeton University Press, 1997.
  A sequel to Axelrod's seminal book, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984). It covers research by Axelrod on the evolution of coooperation since 1984, together with commentary that places this research in context.

  Ken Binmore, Playing Fair: Game Theory and the Social Contract I, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.

  Argues that game theory provides a systematic tool for investigating ethical matters. Reinterprets classical social contract ideas within a game-theoretic framework. Argues for an emphasis on process in game theory rather than the traditional axiomatic approach. Includes a detailed discussion of the work of Axelrod and others on the evolution of cooperation.

  Ken Binmore, Just Playing: Game theory and the Social Contract II, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, forthcoming.

  Stresses ways in which theory can shed light on issues such as the evolution of cooperation that some researchers attempt to treat entirely through computer simulation.

  David V. Budescu, Ido erev, and Rami Zwick, Games and Human Behavior: Essays in Honor of Amnon Rapoport, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mawhaw, NJ, 1998, 440 pages, ISBN: 0805826599.

  From the publisher: "The editors have brought together leading researchers in the fields of experimental economics, behavioral game theory, and social dilemmas to engage in constructive dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the new insights into the motivation of human behavior under a variety of naturally or artificially induced incentive structures that are emerging from their work. Amnon Rapoport -- a pioneer and leader in experimental study and quantitative modeling of human decisions in social and interactive contexts - is honored."

  Colin Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction, Princeton University Press, 544 pp., April 2003, ISBN: 0-691-09039-4.

  From the publisher: "Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose."

  Colin Camerer if Rea A. and Lea G. Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology.

  Russell W. Cooper, Coordination Games: Complementarities and Macroeconomics, Cambridge University Press, c. 1998, 184 pp., ISBN: 0-521-57896-5 (paperback).

  From the publisher: "This book studies the implications of macroeconomic complementarities for aggregate behavior. The presentation is intended to introduce Ph.D. students into this sub-field of macroeconomics and to serve as a reference for more advanced scholars. The initial sections of the book cover the basic framework of complementarities and provide a discussion of the experimental evidence on the outcome of coordination games. The subsequent sections of the book investigate applications of these ideas for macroeconomics. The topics Professor Cooper explores include: economies with production externalities; search models; imperfectly competitive product markets; models of timing and delay; and the role of government in resolving and creating coordination problems."

  Russell Cooper is a Professor of Economics at Boston University.

  Peter Danielson, Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games, Routledge, 1992, ISBN: 0415076919.

  From the publisher: "(This book) shows how to build moral agents that succeed in competition with amoral agents. Peter Danielson's agents deviate from the received theory of rational choice. They are bound by moral principles and communicate their principles to others. The central thesis of the book is that these moral agents are more successful in crucial tests, and therefore rational."

  Peter Danielson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

  Avanish Dixit and Susan Skeath, Games of Strategy, W. W. Norton & Company, 600pp., 1999, ISBN: 0-393-97421-9.

  From a review by Vince Crawford (Professor of Economics, UC San Diego, CA): "The game-theoretic revolution of the past three decades left in its wake formidable barriers to entry for those without formal training in game theory. (This book) conveys a deep understanding of game theory and its applications with almost all of the accessibility and readability of my favorite book on game theory for general audiences, Thinking Strategically by Avanish Dixit and Barry Nalebuff (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991). The exposition assumes no prior familiarity with game theory or economics, and it is mathematically elementary in that only knowledge of algebra is assumed, supplemented with some optional alternative arguments using calculus. This unusual combination of strengths makes (this book) an ideal self-contained text for first- and second-year or more advanced undergraduates; excellent background reading for graduate students; and a good introduction for general readers.... The introductory chapter is a tour de force of motivating examples from economics, political science, sports, and daily life."

  Avanish Dixit is John J. F. Sherrerd `52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University, NJ. Susan Skeath is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Wellesley College, MA.

  Robert Gibbons, "An Introduction to Applicable Game Theory", Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1997, pages 127-149.

  This article is a relatively non-technical tutorial on basic game theory. The author provides definitions and intuitive examples of basic kinds of games and discusses solution concepts for these games.

  Herb Gintis, Game Theory Evolving, Princeton University Press, June 2000.

  This book is strongly problem-oriented. It stresses agent-based evolutionary dynamics, using illustrations from both economics and biology. The author highlights the `low rationality' aspects of game dynamics. He particularly emphasizes the need for better models of the individual actor in view of the large number of anomalies in the predictions of the traditional model of the `rational actor' uncovered in laboratory experiments with human subjects.

  Douglas Hofstadter, "Computer Tournaments of the Prisoner's Dilemma Suggest How Cooperation Evolves", Scientific American (May 1983), 16-26; and "The Calculus of Cooperation is Tested Through a Lottery," Scientific American (June 1983), pp. 18-28.

  David M. Kreps, Game Theory and Economic Modelling, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.

  Basic game theory tools, illustrated graphically and by numerous examples, and the questions that these tools can and cannot answer.

  Sarit Kraus, Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments, The MIT Press, 280 pp., September 1, 2001, ISBN: 0-262-11264-7.

  From the publisher: "Sarit Kraus is concerned here with the cooperation and coordination of intelligent agents that are self-interested and usually owned by different individuals or organizations. Conflicts frequently arise, and negotiation is one of the main mechanisms for reaching agreement. Kraus presents a strategic-negotiation model that enables autonomous agents to reach mutually beneficial agreements efficiently in complex environments. The model, which integrates game theory, economic techniques, and heuristic methods of artificial intelligence, can be automated in computer systems or applied to human situations. The book provides both theoretical and experimental results."

  Sarit Kraus is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Professor of Computer Scinece in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

  George Mailath (Guest Editor), Symposium on Evolutionary Game Theory, Journal of Economic Theory 57 (1992), pp. 259-277.

  John Miller, "Two Essays on the Economics of Imperfect Information", Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1988.

  Original development of the work appearing in the extensively cited 1989 SFI working paper by Miller on the coevolution of cooperative behavior in the repeated prisoner's dilemma game, finally published in Miller (JEBO, 1996).

  William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, Double-Day, N.Y., c. 1992.

  Intertwines the development of game theory, illustrated by clear insightful examples, with the biography of one of its founders, John von Neumann.

  Reinhard Selten, Game Theory and Economic Behavior, Edward Elgar Press, Two Volume Set, April 1999, 904 pp., $210.00 (hardback). ISBN: 1-858-98872-1

  From the publisher: "In 1994, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Reinhard Selten, John Nash and John Harsanyi, for pioneering analysis in game theory. ... This outstanding two volume selection of Selten's work provides a comprehensive overview of his contribution to game theory and economic behavior. Topics include: axiomatic characterizations; learning; political and social interaction; theories of oligopolistic competition; oligopoly experiments; and bilateral and coalition bargaining. The two volumes also contain a foreword by Alvin Roth, a detailed introduction to Selten's work by Andreas Ortmann and a full bibliography of Selten's publications."

  Reinhard Selten is at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Germany.

  Martin Shubik, Game Theory, Money, and the Price System: The Selected Essays of Martin Shubik, Edward Elgar Press, Two Volume Set, May 1999, 1000 pp., $200.00 (hardback). ISBN: 1-858-98241-3

  From the publisher: "(This two volume set) spans some forty years of work on strategic economic behavior. In particular, the book shows many different properties of the price system reflecting efficiency, power, fair division, and decentralization in a mass economy. This collection of essays by Martin Shubik applies game theory methods to the basic study of both the price system and money and financial systems, stressing the value of games that can be both played and analyzed - providing an important link between theory and process and institutional studies."

  Martin Shubik is a Professor of Economics at Yale University.

  Martin Shubik, "Game Theory, Complexity, and Simplicity: Part I", Complexity, Vol. 3/No. 2, November/December 1997, 39-46.

  Clarifies the meaning of "cooperative" and "noncooperative" games, and notes the uses and limitations of each type of game. Also discusses the reasons for the current "gross inadequacy" of dynamic game theory.

  Martin Shubik, "Game Theory, Complexity, and Simplicity: Part II", Complexity, Vol. 3/No. 3, January/February 1998, 36-45.

  Clarifies four key distinctions among the many approaches to the development and use of game theory tools.

  Martin Shubik, "Game Theory, Complexity, and Simplicity Part III: Critique and Perspective", Complexity, Vol. 3/No. 5, May/June 1998, 34-46.

  Argues that a new set of questions must be answered by game theory that have not previously been addressed, and the ability to answer these questions depends on enlarging the scope of classical game theory models.

  Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  From the book cover: "In this pithy and highly readable book, Brian Skyrms, a recognized authority on game theory and decision theory, investigates traditional problems of the social contract in terms of evolutionary dynamics. Game theory is skillfully employed to offer quite new interpretations of a wide variety of social phenomena, including justice, mutual aid, commitment, convention, and meaning."

  Brian Skyrms, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, expected publication in January 2004. ISBN: 0-521-53392-9.

  From the publisher: "Brian Skyrms' study of ideas of cooperation and collective action explores the implications of a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. It is therein that Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare (where the risk of non-cooperation is small and the rewared equally small) against the pay-off of hunting the stag (where maximum cooperation is required but the reward is much greater). Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms' characteristic clarity and verve, (this book) will be eagerly sought by readers who enjoyed his earlier work Evolution of the Social Contract."

  Brian Skyrms is Distinguished Professor of Logic, Philosophy of Science, and Economics, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of California, Irvine.

  E. Anne Stanley, Dan Ashlock, and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with Choice and Refusal of Partners", pp. 131-175 in C. Langton, Artificial Life III, Vol. 17, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Redwood, CA, 1994.

  This article extends the traditional iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) with round-robin partner matching by permitting players to choose and refuse partners in each iteration on the basis of continually updated expected payoffs. Comparative computer experiments are reported that indicate the introduction of partner choice and refusal accelerates the emergence of mutual cooperation in the IPD relative to round-robin partner matching. For related work, see the Trade Network Game (TNG) Home Page.

  Leigh Tesfatsion, "A Trade Network Game with Endogenous Partner Selection", pp. 249-269 in H. M. Amman, B. Rustem, and A. B. Whinston (eds.), Computational Approaches to Economic Problems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.

  This study develops an agent-based computational economics framework called the Trade Network Game (TNG) for studying the interplay between evolutionary game dynamics and preferential partner selection in decentralized markets. The TNG consists of successive generations of resource-constrained traders who choose and refuse trade partners on the basis of continually updated expected payoffs, engage in risky trades modelled as two-person games, and evolve their trade strategies over time. Preliminary computer experiments are reported which suggest that the standard optimality properties used to judge the desirability of matching mechanisms in static market contexts may be inadequate measures of optimality from an evolutionary perspective. For related work (TNG research articles, TNG source code, and a TNG Lab with real-time network visualization), visit the TNG Home Page.

  John B. Van Huyck, R. C. Battalio, and R. O. Beil, "Tacit Coordination Games, Strategic Uncertainty, and Coordination Failure", American Economic Review (March 1990), pp. 234-248. and V. Crawford, "An `Evolutionary' Interpretation of Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil's Experimental Results on Coordination," Games and Economic Behavior 3 (1991), pp. 25-59.

  H. Peyton Young, Individual and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1998, 184 pages, Cloth: 0-691-02684-X.

  From the publisher: "Traditionally, economists have assumed an ideal world where people make perfectly rational decisions based on complete knowledge of their particular situation. (This book) proposes a new analytical framework based on a more realistic world in which people have a limited understanding of their environment, sometimes leading them to do short-sighted or irrational things. Using game theory, Young postulates that customs, norms, and forms of organization are built up over long periods of time from the cumulative experience of many individuals into recognizable patterns of social behavior. At the macro level, the theory predicts how institutions will evolve and what characteristics they will possess. At the micro level, it shows that individual interactions will often take the form of a game with multiple equilibria." H. Peyton Young is Scott and Barbara Black Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Copyright © 2006 Leigh Tesfatsion. All Rights Reserved.