Macroeconomics in a Self-organizing Economy*

This paper emphasizes the importance of considering the mechanisms that coordinate economic transactions in a decentralized economy, namely the role played by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms, for theories aimed at guiding macroeconomic policy. We review a research program that aims to understand how, and how well, trading activities are coordinated in various circumstances by employing agent-based computational (ACE) models of stylized economies where these activities take place in a self-organizing network of markets created and operated by profit-seeking business firms. We discuss how such a research program can yield important policy-relevant insights, beyond those that can be offered by conventional dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, into several macroeconomic phenomena including the emergence of monetary equilibria in a decentralized economy, the microfoundations of the multiplier process, the costs of a higher trend rate of inflation, and the role of the banking system in economic crises.