Agent-Based Computer Simulation of Dichotomous Economic Growth reports
a project in agent-based computer stimulation of processes of economic
growth in a population of boundedly rational learning agents.
The study is an exercise in comparative simulation. That is, the same
family of growth models will be simulated under different assumptions
about the nature of the learning process and details of the production
and growth processes. The purpose of this procedure is to establish a
relationship between the assumptions and the simulation results.
The study brings together a number of theoretical and technical
developments, only some of which may be familiar to any particular
reader. In this first chapter, some issues in economic growth are
reviewed and the objectives of the study are outlined. In the second
chapter, the simulation techniques are introduced and illustrated with
baseline simulations of boundedly rational learning processes that do
not involve the complications of dealing with long-run economic growth.
The third chapter sketches the consensus modern theory of economic
growth which is the starting point for further study. In the fourth
chapter, a family of steady growth models are simulated, bringing the
simulation, growth and learning aspects of the study together. In
subsequent chapters, variants on the growth model are explored in a
similar way. The ninth chapter introduces trade, with a spacial trading
model that is combined with the growth model in the tenth chapter.
The book returns again and again to the key question: to what extent can
the simulations `explain' the puzzles of economic growth, and
particularly the key puzzle of dichotomization, by constructing growth
and learning processes that produce the puzzling results? And just what
assumptions of the simulations are most predictable associated with the
puzzling results?
