The Future of Agent-Based Research in Economics

Abstract

Agent-based economics, and more generally agent-based social sciences, have been around in various forms for over 30 years. The advent of higher speed computing and new tools for the computational learning fields led to a major increase in activity in the early 1990s through today. Research activity continues to increase at the current time, but the field still remains somewhat of a "niche field" inside economics. Certain conferences and certain regions (such as Europe) are well populated with agent-based activity. However, at mainstream conferences inside the US one would have a hard time in finding agent-based researchers.