We present examples of agent-based and stochastic models of competition and business processes in economics and finance. We start from as simple as possible models, which have microscopic, agent-based, versions and macroscopic treatment in behavior. Microscopic and macroscopic versions of herding model proposed by Kirman and Bass diffusion of new products are considered in this contribution as two basic ideas. Further we demonstrate that general herding behavior can be considered as a background of nonlinear stochastic model of financial fluctuations.
In the recent decades there were many attempts to create an agent-based model for the financial markets, yet no model so far is realistic enough and tractable to be considered as an ideal model @cite_29 . One of the best examples of realistic models is so-called Lux and Marchesi model @cite_20 , which is heavily based on the behavioral economics ideas mathematically put down as utility functions for the agents in the market, thus it is considered to be very reasonable and realistic @cite_29 . Yet this model is too complex, namely it has many parameters and complex agent interaction mechanics, to be analytically tractable. Another example of a very complex agent-based model would be Bornholdt's spin model @cite_17 @cite_7 , which is based on a certain interpretation of the well-known Ising model (for the details on the original model see any handbook on statistical physics (ex., @cite_1 )).
@cite_7 @cite_29 @cite_1 @cite_20 @cite_17
2761043131 1537415400 1524135913 2017627906
Agent-based modeling of zapping behavior of viewers, television commercial allocation, and advertisement markets by Hiroyuki Kyan and Jun-ichi Inoue.- Agent based modeling of Housing asset bubble: A simple utility function based investigation by Kausik Gangopadhyay and Kousik Guhathakurta.- Urn model-based adaptive Multi-arm clinical trials: A stochastic approximation approach by Sophie Laruelle and Gilles Pages.- Logistic modeling of a Religious Sect features by Marcel Ausloos.- Characterizing financial crisis by means of the three states random field Ising model by Mitsuaki Murota and Jun-ichi Inoue.- Themes and applications of kinetic exchange models: Redux by Asim Ghosh, Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Anjan Kumar Chandra and Anirban Chakraborti.- Kinetic exchange opinion model: solution in the single parameter map limit by Krishanu Roy Chowdhury, Asim Ghosh, Soumyajyoti Biswas and Bikas K. Chakrabarti.- An overview of the new frontiers of Economic Complexity by Matthieu Cristelli, Andrea Tacchella, Luciano Pietronero.- Jan Tinbergen's legacy for economic networks: from the gravity model to quantum statistics by Tiziano Squartini and Diego Garlaschelli.- A macroscopic order of consumer demand due to heterogenous consumer behaviors on Japanese household demand tested by the random matrix theory by Yuji Aruka,Yuichi Kichikawa and Hiroshi Iyetomi.- Uncovering the network structure of the world currency market: Cross-correlations in the fluctuations of daily exchange rates by Sitabhra Sinha and Uday Kovur.- Systemic risk in Japanese credit network by Hideaki Aoyama.- Pricing of goods with Bandwagon properties: The curse of coordination by Mirta B. Gordon, Jean-Pierre Nadal, Denis Phan and Viktoriya Semeshenko.- Evolution of Econophysics by Kishore C. Dash.- Econophysics and sociophysics: Problems and prospects by Asim Ghosh and Anindya S. Chakrabarti.- A discussion on Econophysics by Hideaki Aoyama. This paper reports statistical analyses performed on simulated data from a stochastic multi-agent model of speculative behaviour in a financial market. The price dynamics resulting from this artificial market process exhibits the same type of scaling laws as do empirical data from stock markets and foreign exchange markets: (i) one observes scaling in the probability distribution of relative price changes with a Pareto exponent around 2.6, (ii) volatility shows significant long-range correlation with a self-similarity parameter H around 0.85. This happens although we assume that news about the intrinsic or fundamental value of the asset follows a white noise process and, hence, incorporation of news about fundamental factors is insufficient to explain either of the characteristics (i) or (ii). As a consequence, in our model, the main stylised facts of financial data originate from the working of the market itself and one need not resort to scaling in unobservable extraneous signals as an explanation of the source of scaling in financial prices. The emergence of power laws can be explained by the existence of a critical state which is repeatedly approached in the course of the system's development. We present an overview of some representative Agent-Based Models in Economics. We discuss why and how agent-based models represent an important step in order to explain the dynamics and the statistical properties of financial markets beyond the Classical Theory of Economics. We perform a schematic analysis of several models with respect to some specific key categories such as agents' strategies, price evolution, number of agents, etc. In the conclusive part of this review we address some open questions and future perspectives and highlight the conceptual importance of some usually neglected topics, such as non-stationarity and the self-organization of financial markets. Extensive exploration of simulation models comes at a high computational cost, all the more when the model involves a lot of parameters. Economists usually rely on random explorations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, and basic econometric modeling to approximate the properties of computational models. This paper aims to provide guidelines for the use of a much more efficient method that combines a parsimonious sampling of the parameter space using a specific design of experiments (DoE), with a well-suited metamodeling method first developed in geostatistics: kriging. We illustrate these guidelines by following them in the analysis of two simple and well known economic models: Nelson and Winter's industrial dynamics model, and Cournot oligopoly with learning firms. In each case, we show that our DoE experiments can catch the main effects of the parameters on the models' dynamics with a much lower number of simulations than the Monte-Carlo sampling (e.g. 85 simulations instead of 2,000 in the first case). In the analysis of the second model, we also introduce supplementary numerical tools that may be combined with this method, for characterizing configurations complying with a specific criterion (social optimal, replication of stylized facts, etc.). Our appendix gives an example of the R-project code that can be used to apply this method on other models, in order to encourage other researchers to quickly test this approach on their models.