Growing Artificial Societies

ECON 450/650, Summer 2023

This course teaches students how to use a computer to build and analyze artificial societies. The course also teaches skills in technical report writing, data visualization, and basic programming. The only prerequisite is introductory microeconomics.

Overview

Students experiment with (and even create) virtual worlds in order to shed light on the actual world. The models are “agent-based”. This means that they demonstrate how society-wide outcomes emerge from the interaction of heterogeneous individuals (“agents”) in various socio-economic settings. Applications include the following:

institutional determinants of inequality in the distribution of wealth
sources of segregation in urban housing
causes of financial market fluctuations
causes of macroeconomic fluctuations and economic growth
characteristics of social dilemmas such as the tragedy of the commons and possible "escapes" from these dilemmas
origins of cooperative behavior

This course emphasizes economic applications of agent-based modeling. However, computational social science is inherently interdisciplinary, so the readings also draw upon other social sciences (particularly sociology and political science). Discussions occasionally focus on technical details relevant to specific ABMS applications, which means that the course introduces some basic concepts from computer science.

Students should take one introductory economics course (preferably microeconomics) before attempting this course. There are no other prerequisites. In particular, this course does not assume that students have prior experience with computer programming. It is specifically designed as an introduction to the tools, methods, and applications of agent-based modeling and simulation.

This course is project oriented; there are no exams. Students complete three homework projects and a substantial project-based term paper.