Book Description

This special issue contains selected papers from the wild@ace 2004 conference, organized by LABORatorio R. Revelli Centre for Employment Studies and held in Moncalieri, Italy, on December 3-4, 2004. The acronym stands for Workshop on Industry and Labour Dynamics - The Agent-based Computational Economics Approach, and was introduced with the first wild@ace conference in 2003 (Leombruni and Richiardi, 2004). It will be followed in the fall of 2006 by a third event, devoted to the structural estimation of agent-based models by means of indirect inference techniques.The wild@ace events are characterized by a double focus: research topics and methodology. For what concerns the latter, agent-based simulations are computer models in which a multitude of agents - each embodied in a specific software code - evolves and interacts. These agents can represent individuals, households, firms, institutions, etc. The aggregate behavior of the system is then reconstructed quot;from the bottom upquot;, by simple arithmetic computation (Tesfatsion, 2005; Leombruni et al., 2006). Our interest in this quot;newquot; methodology lies in the insights that it can give to the 'old' fields of industrial organization and labor economics. Heterogeneity in characteristics and behaviours are widely recognized by the empirical literature as crucial features in both fields, but they are hardly tackled with in theoretical models, often based on the representative agent framework and other over simplifying assumptions. Agent-based models can overcome many of these limitations, as the contributions to this special issue demonstrate.