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The Missing Legacy of Herbert Simon in Agent-Based Computational Economics

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Decision Economics, In Commemoration of the Birth Centennial of Herbert A. Simon 1916-2016 (Nobel Prize in Economics 1978)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 475))

Abstract

In this article, we examine the legacy of Simon in Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE). We show that both near decomposability and modularity, the two essential ingredients of the Simonian economics, have not been seriously pursued by the ACE community. First, most ACE models are not endogenously multi-level, which makes near decomposability be not much relevant to ACE. Second, while the modularity approach has already been employed by Simon in his artificial intelligence research and can help shape a notion of autonomous agents, this approach is also not well followed by the ACE community. Instead, most artificial agents used in ACE have been put in rather identically repeated environment not much different what the movie “Groundhog Day” depicts [23]. Hence, they are not able to do serious novelty or chance discovery, and the creativity of artificial agents have not been taken seriously by most ACEers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AI-ECON Research Center, Department of Economics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, 11605, Taiwan

    Shu-Heng Chen

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  1. Shu-Heng Chen
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Correspondence to Shu-Heng Chen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy

    Edgardo Bucciarelli

  2. Dept of Economical-Statistical and PES, University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy

    Marcello Silvestri

  3. Fac Ciencias, Dept de Info y Automática, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Sara Rodríguez González

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Chen, SH. (2016). The Missing Legacy of Herbert Simon in Agent-Based Computational Economics. In: Bucciarelli, E., Silvestri, M., Rodríguez González, S. (eds) Decision Economics, In Commemoration of the Birth Centennial of Herbert A. Simon 1916-2016 (Nobel Prize in Economics 1978). Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40111-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40111-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40110-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40111-9

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