This book contributes substantively to the current state of the art of macroeconomic modeling by providing a method for modeling large collections of heterogeneous agents subject to nonpairwise externality called field effects, i.e. feedback of aggregate effects on individual agents or agents using state-dependent strategies. Adopting a level of microeconomic description that keeps track of compositions of fractions of agents by "types" or "strategies", time evolution of the microeconomic states is described by (backward) Chapman-Kolmogorov equations.
Contents
Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction; 2. Simple illustrative and motivating examples; 3. Empirical distributions: statistical laws in macroeconomics; Part II. Modeling Interactions: 4. Modeling interactions I: Jump Markov processes; 5. Modeling interactions II: master equations and field effects; 6. Modeling interactions III: pairwise and multiple-pair interactions; Part III. Hierarchical Dynamics and Critical phenomena: 7. Sluggish dynamics and hierarchical state spaces; 8. Self-organizing and other critical phenomena in economic models; 9. Appendices; Symbol Index; Subject Index.
Review
"Economists are indebted to Masanao Aoki. He has done an excellent job in bringing together a large amount of important material on stochastic dynamics, showing economists how to use it, and presenting it all in a clear and readable manner. The examples which he presents are interesting but surely only scratch the surface of what these tools can do to improve the realism and depth of economic modeling, macro and micro." Ken Judd, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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