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What economic agents do: How cognition and interaction lead to emergence and complexity

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Abstract

Kohn (The Cato Journal, 24(3):303–339, 2004) has argued that the neoclassical conception of economics—what he terms the “value paradigm”—has experienced diminishing marginal returns for some time. He suggests a new perspective is emerging—one that gives more import to economic processes and less to end states, one that bases behavior less on axioms and more on laboratory experiments. He calls this the “exchange paradigm”. He further asserts that it is the mathematization of economics that is partially at fault for leading the profession down a methodological path that has become something of a dead end. Here I suggest that the nascent research program Kohn has rightly spotted is better understood as distinct from its precursors because it is intrinsically dynamic, permits agent actions out of equilibrium, and treats such actions as occurring within networks. Analyzing economic processes having these characteristics is mathematically very difficult and I concur with Kohn’s appeal to computational approaches. However, I claim it is so-called multi-agent systems and agent-based models that are the way forward within the “exchange paradigm,” and not the cellular automata (Wolfram, A new kind of science, 2002) that Kohn seems to promote. Agent systems are generalizations of cellular automata and support the natural abstraction of individual economic agents as software agents.

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Notes

  1. “[E]conomics as a discipline has no special claim to understanding the nature of individual behavior; presumably psychologists and cognitive scientists have much more to say about it. The stock in trade of economics, rather, is its understanding of the aggregate outcome of individual behavior—or more precisely, of the ‘unintended consequences’ of intended actions.”

  2. Buchanan (1964) makes essentially the same point in discussing Robinson Crusoe’s solitary allocation problem that becomes ‘symbiotic’ once Friday arrives and the two are brought into association with one another.

  3. “For the exchange paradigm, the concept of market failure is meaningless” (Kohn 2004: 325).

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Acknowledgement

The author thank the organizers of the symposium for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Robert L. Axtell

  2. Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Robert L. Axtell

  3. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA

    Robert L. Axtell

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Axtell, R.L. What economic agents do: How cognition and interaction lead to emergence and complexity. Rev Austrian Econ 20, 105–122 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-007-0021-5

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