Economics With Heterogeneous Interacting Agents: A Practical Guide To Agent-Based Modeling

This book offers a practical guide to agent-based economic modeling, adopting a "learning by doing" approach to help the reader master the fundamental tools needed to create and analyze agent-based models. After providing a basic "toolkit" for agent-based modeling, it presents and discusses didactic models of real financial and economic systems in detail. The book highlights the main features and advantages of the bottom-up perspective inherent to this approach, emphasizing the logic and practical steps in model building. It includes detailed code descriptions developed using R and C. Each model is accompanied by exercises and applications to promote active learning. The book also presents tools such as sensitivity analysis, calibration exercises, economic network analysis, and statistical distributions analysis for model validation. By the end, readers will have a deeper understanding of the agent-based methodology and be prepared to develop their own economic models, making it suitable for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as academic institutions and lecturers.