Emergence of Institutions and Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems

Today much is known about how to get prices, markets, even trade networks to emerge in agent-based computational models. Substantially less is known about how to get norms, customs and conventions to arise spontaneously, although work in both computational models and evolutionary game theory has yielded useful insights. Arguably, almost nothing is known about how to get multi-agent institutions and organizations to self-organize in such models. Recent research efforts in this area will be surveyed. The main thesis of this lecture will be that once we know how institutions and organizations can be made to reliably emerge in multi-agent models then we will have the capability to move beyond today's highly individualist conceptualizations and accounts of social and economic activities.

Author: Robert Axtell
The Brookings Institution

Rob Axtell is a Fellow in the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution and Member of the Santa Fe Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he studied computing, economics, operations research, and pulic policy. He is the author of research papers in the areas of mathematical modeling, economic theory, environmental policy, and computer science. His current research is focused on modeling economic processes using populations of software agents. He is the co-author, with Joshua Epstein, of "Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom-Up," a book and CD-ROM published by MIT Press. Most recently he has been using agents to study bilateral exchange processes, the emergence of economic classes, the self-organization of firms, and Anasazi archaeology.

Emergence of Institutions and Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems

Click here to start

Table of Contents