Introduction to Agent-Based Stock-Flow Consistent Modelling

Economics has long been the domain of the ivory tower, where specialized language and opaque theorems make it inaccessible to most people. That’s a problem.

How do people make decisions? There is a class of models in psychology which seek to answer this question but have received scant attention in economics despite some clear empirical successes. In a previous post I discussed one of these, Decision by Sampling, and this post will look at another: the so-called Fast and Frugal heuristics pioneered by the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Here the individual seeks out sufficient information to make a reasonable decision. They are ‘fast’ because they do not require massive computational effort to make a decision so can be done in seconds, and they are ‘frugal’ because they use as little information as possible to make the decision effectively.

The usual background and distinctions between complexity and neoclassical economics are presented. Neoclassical economics deals with perfectly rational representative agents -this creates states of equilibrium. On the other hand, complexity economics relaxes these assumptions to deal with responsive agents in an uncertain dynamic environment -this creates states of disequilibrium. More …

Dans une vidéo dense mais pédagogique, Heu?reka nous emmène dans les arcanes de la modélisation économique et environnementale. En partant d'une controverse entre les auteurs du célèbre rapport Meadows sur les limites de la croissance et des économistes d'obédience néoclassique, on découvre deux approches différentes pour un même objectif : …