Francesco Luna – författare

This volume on financial and economic simulations in Swarm marks the continued progress by a group of researchers to incorporate agent-based computer models as an important tool within their discipline. Swarm promotes agent-based computer models as a tool for the study of complex systems. A common language is leading to the growth of user communities in specific areas of application. Furthermore, by providing an organizing framework to guide the development of more problem-specific structures, and by dealing with a whole range of issues that affect their fundamental correctness and their ability to be developed and reused, Swarm has sought to make the use of agent-based models a legitimate tool of scientific investigation that also meets the practical needs of investigators within a community. Swarm's principal foundation is an object-oriented representation of active agents interacting among themselves and with their environment. To this base layer it adds its own structures to drive, record and portrait the events that occur across this world.The specific contents of any world, however, are up to the experimenter to provide, either by building them from scratch or by tapping previous contributions. This book assembles a rich array of such contributions, which are significant in their own right, but which can also be mined to extract the reusable elements in their respective areas of finance and economics. It also presents three interesting software additions with tutorials in the form of simple financial and economic applications. A Swarm meta-language closer to a "natural language", the use of internet-augmented Swarm for experimental economics, and a Swarm visual builder will meet the challenges launched by other agent-based modelling competitors. The Swarm community at large can benefit greatly from the lead that the growing field of computational economics is taking to address its own needs, as represented by this book.

Computer simulations of economic systems are slowly gaining ground within the economic profession. However, such a process is hindered by a lack of communication among researchers who do not share a common language. For its object-oriented structure and its versatility, Swarm has the necessary characteristics to become a credible universal language of agent-based simulations. This text collects a series of original articles in such domains as macro and micro economics, industrial organization, monetary theory, and finance, all linked by a common denominator: the use of the Swarm simulation platform. Swarm, a standard set of program libraries, allows users to construct simulations where a collection of heterogeneous independent agents or elements interact through discrete events. This volume provides a tutorial to the use of these software libraries developed at the Santa Fe Institute as part of the ongoing research into complexity. The editors conceived the idea of this book while visiting the Santa Fe Institute as members of the "Working Group on Adaptive and Computable Economics".

This second book on financial and economic simulations in Swarm marks the continued progress by a group of researchers to incorporate agent-based computer models as an important tool within their disci­ pline. It is encouraging to see such a clear example of Swarm helping to foster a community of users who rely on the Swarm framework for their own analyses. Swarm aims at legitimizing agent-based computer models as a tool for the study of complex systems. A further goal is that a common base framework will lead to the growth of user communities in specific areas of application. By providing an organizing framework to guide the development of more problem-specific structures, and by dealing with a whole range of issues that affect their fundamental correctness and their ability to be developed and reused, Swarm has sought to make the use of agent-based models a legitimate tool of scientific investigation that also meets the practical needs of investigators within a community.