A brief overview of agent-based computational economics (ACE) is given, followed by a synopsis of the articles included in this special issue on ACE and in a companion special issue on ACE scheduled to appear in Computational Economics. ( 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classixcation: B4; C6

In agent-based computational economics, many different trading strategies have been proposed. Given the kinds of market that such trading strategies are employed in, it is clear that the performance of the strategies depends heavily on the behavior of other traders. However, most trading strategies are studied in homogeneous populations, and those tests that have been carried out on heterogeneo...

Time is an inherent feature of many medical applications. These applications can also benefit from the support of object database management systems which better capture the semantics of the complex objects that arise in the medical domain. In this paper, we present a uniform behavioral temporal object model which includes a rich and extensible set of types and behaviors to support the various ...

Choices need to be made between competing uses of health care resources. There is debate about how these choices should be made, who should make them and the criteria upon which they should be made. Evaluation of health care is an important part of this debate. It has been suggested that the contribution of health economics to the evaluation of health promotion is limited, both because the meth...

This paper examines the evolution of unplanned coordination among independent agents in a market selection game, which is a non-cooperative repeated game with many agents and several markets. Every agent is supposed to simultaneously choose a single market for maximizing its own payoff obtained by selling its product at the selected market. It is assumed that the market price is determined by t...

Pertaining to Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), this work presents two models for the rise and downfall of speculative bubbles through an exchange price fixing based on a double auction mechanism. The first model is based in a finite time horizon context where total expected dividends decrease along with time. The second model follows the greater fool hypothesis: an agent behaviour dep...