Advances in experimental and agent-based modelling: Asset markets, economic networks, computational mechanism design and evolutionary game dynamics

This Special Issue consists mostly of the work presented at the Tenth Workshop on Economic Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (WEHIA 2005) hosted by the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents of the University of Essex, UK. The collection reports on advances in an exciting and fast growing subfield of economics, with replication and analysis of markets and other socio-economic environments with interacting, often heterogeneous, artificial and human agents as the major themes. The conference also honoured the contributions of Benoit Mandelbrot who delivered a keynote address on the statistical signatures of complex dynamical systems characterized by non-Gaussian phenomena of fat tails and fractal nature of volatility – themes that resonate in a number of contributions included here. The subfield that comprises these papers is variously referred to as agent-based computational economics (ACE) and Economic Science for Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (ESHIA). This field has built on advances in complex adaptive systems (CAS) and computer hardware and software that are outlined below.