External links
- Leigh Tesfatsion's homepage
- Agent-Based Computational Economics - maintained by Leigh Tesfatsion
- "Leigh Tesfatsion". JSTOR.
Leigh S. Tesfatsion | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | U.S. |
| Institution | Iowa State University University of Southern California |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota Carleton College |
| Doctoral advisor | Clifford Hildreth Leonid Hurwicz |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Leigh Tesfatsion is a computational economist who taught at Iowa State University. She received her doctorate at the University of Minnesota, and taught at the University of Southern California before moving to Iowa State. She is known for promoting agent-based models as an alternative to rational expectations general equilibrium models for studying markets, finance, and macroeconomic phenomena. Her works are widely cited in the literature on the subject. [1]
Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies.
In economics, general equilibrium theory attempts to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that the interaction of demand and supply will result in an overall general equilibrium. General equilibrium theory contrasts to the theory of partial equilibrium, which only analyzes single markets.
Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline, political economy originated in moral philosophy, in the 18th century, to explore the administration of states' wealth, with "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word "okonomie". The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781).
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in order to mimic real-world incentives. Experiments are used to help understand how and why markets and other exchange systems function as they do. Experimental economics have also expanded to understand institutions and the law.
The Lucas critique, named for Robert Lucas's work on macroeconomic policymaking, argues that it is naive to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data. More formally, it states that the decision rules of Keynesian models—such as the consumption function—cannot be considered as structural in the sense of being invariant with respect to changes in government policy variables. The Lucas critique is significant in the history of economic thought as a representative of the paradigm shift that occurred in macroeconomic theory in the 1970s towards attempts at establishing micro-foundations.
Economists use the term representative agent to refer to the typical decision-maker of a certain type.
In economics, a model is a theoretical construct representing economic processes by a set of variables and a set of logical and/or quantitative relationships between them. The economic model is a simplified, often mathematical, framework designed to illustrate complex processes. Frequently, economic models posit structural parameters. A model may have various exogenous variables, and those variables may change to create various responses by economic variables. Methodological uses of models include investigation, theorizing, and fitting theories to the world.
A macroeconomic model is an analytical tool designed to describe the operation of the problems of economy of a country or a region. These models are usually designed to examine the comparative statics and dynamics of aggregate quantities such as the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the level of prices.
Computational economics is a research discipline at the interface of computer science, economics, and management science. This subject encompasses computational modeling of economic systems, whether agent-based, general-equilibrium, macroeconomic, or rational-expectations, computational econometrics and statistics, computational finance, computational tools for the design of automated internet markets, programming tool specifically designed for computational economics and the teaching of computational economics. Some of these areas are unique, while others extend traditional areas of economics by solving problems that are tedious to study without computers and associated numerical methods.
Heterodox economics is a term that may be used in contrast with orthodox economics in schools of economic thought or methodologies, that may be beyond neoclassical economics. Heterodox economics is an umbrella term that can cover various schools of thought or theories. These include institutional, evolutionary, feminist, social, post-Keynesian, ecological, Georgist, Austrian, Marxian, socialist and anarchist economics, among others.
In economics, an agent is an actor and more specifically a decision maker in a model of some aspect of the economy. Typically, every agent makes decisions by solving a well- or ill-defined optimization or choice problem.
Mainstream economics is the body of knowledge, theories, and models of economics, as taught by universities worldwide, that are generally accepted by economists as a basis for discussion. Also known as orthodox economics, it can be contrasted to heterodox economics, which encompasses various schools or approaches that are only accepted by a minority of economists.
Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to the problems of economics. It sees the economy not as a system in equilibrium, but as one in motion, perpetually constructing itself anew. It uses computational rather than mathematical analysis to explore how economic structure is formed and reformed, in continuous interaction with the adaptive behavior of the 'agents' in the economy
Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the area of computational economics that studies economic processes, including whole economies, as dynamic systems of interacting agents. As such, it falls in the paradigm of complex adaptive systems. In corresponding agent-based models, the "agents" are "computational objects modeled as interacting according to rules" over space and time, not real people. The rules are formulated to model behavior and social interactions based on incentives and information. Such rules could also be the result of optimization, realized through use of AI methods.
Kenneth Lewis Judd is a computational economist at Stanford University, where he is the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1980. He is perhaps best known as the author of Numerical Methods in Economics, and he is also among the editors of the Handbook of Computational Economics and of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
Mathematical economics is the application of mathematical methods to represent theories and analyze problems in economics. By convention, these applied methods are beyond simple geometry, such as differential and integral calculus, difference and differential equations, matrix algebra, mathematical programming, and other computational methods. Proponents of this approach claim that it allows the formulation of theoretical relationships with rigor, generality, and simplicity.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Sheri Marina Markose is a computational economist. She is a professor of Economics at the University of Essex, where she holds a personal chair since 2006. She is the founding director (2002-2009) of the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents (CCFEA) at Essex. At CCFEA, with the support of the then Vice Chancellor, Ivor Crewe, she pioneered multi-disciplinary research as well as PhD and Masters programs, which include Agent-based computational economics, financial market modelling with extreme events and markets as complex adaptive systems.
The ACEGES model is a decision support tool for energy policy by means of controlled computational experiments. The ACEGES tool is designed to be the foundation for large custom-purpose simulations of the global energy system. The ACEGES methodological framework, developed by Voudouris (2011) by extending Voudouris (2010), is based on the agent-based computational economics (ACE) paradigm. ACE is the computational study of economies modeled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents.
