Education goes open source:
- Teaching Resources for Undergraduate Economics (part of the Open Educational Resources programme)
Unfortunately this is UK-based. I wonder if anything like that is available in Germany?
Open Source Education
January 23, 2010Links for Jan-8th 2010
January 8, 2010Steve Keen über die Krise und die Neoklassik: “Die Wirtschaftspolitik wurde bestimmt von neoklassischen Ökonomen wie Robert Lucas oder Thomas Sargent, die im Rahmen der Thesen der rationalen Erwartungen argumentierten, Regierungen könnten die konjunkturelle Entwicklung nicht positiv beeinflussen. Sie rechneten zudem überhaupt nicht mit einer Krise im Privatsektor, wie wir sie jetzt haben. Edward Prescott, der den Wirtschafts-Nobelpreis im Jahr 2004 erhielt, erklärte sogar, das kapitalistische System sei in sich stabil und Störungen könnten nur vom öffentlichen Sektor ausgehen. Während dessen kam es zu einem Umdenken: Öffentliche Ausgabenprogramme in Höhe von vier bis sechs Prozent des Weltsozialproduktes verhinderten, dass wir tiefer in die Krise gerieten. Auch das zeigt, dass die neoklassische Theorie falsch ist.”
Quelle: FAZ Online
A Collection of Mathematica Blogs & Websites
December 10, 2009I compiled a list of Mathematica Blogs and Websites which helped me a lot. Looking at other people’s code is a great way of learning about the possibilities of Mathematica.
- Wolfram Blog
- Wolfram’s Online Seminars
- Scientific Arts
- Scientific Arts’ WorkLife
- Mathematica Programming (A great 400 page introduction for programming with Mathematica.)
- Math Estate (Financial Data)
- Carl T. Bergstrom’s Homepage (I used Bergstrom’s package for drawing a two-dimensional simplex.)
- Essential Mathematica for Students of Science (Lots of tutorials!)
- Walking Randomly
- David Park’s Homepage (Add-Ons and Packages for visualization, graphics and style-sheets.)
- Lunchtime Playground
- Wildebeests
- Gianluca Gorni (The CurvesGraphics package for placing arrows along curves and creating nice phase diagrams; and a another package for creating Poincare maps.)
- IMTEK Mathematica Supplement
- Mathematica Gems
- Paul Nylander’s Homepage (Mathematical Arts)
- Patrick Collison
- Verbeia.com (They have a nice section on Mathematica and Economics.)
Wine & Economics
November 30, 2009Just received this call for papers:
Dear wine friends,
the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) will hold its 4th Annual Conference from June 25-28, 2010, at UC Davis in California.
The conference will be hosted by UC Davis and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. All economics and statistics papers related to wine and food are welcome.
Details will be posted on our website at
www.wine-economics.org
Looking forward to next year’s EEA…
November 13, 2009…which will take place in Philadelphia in February. I will present at the Agent-Based Economics Session (organized by Jason Barr).
More information on the conference can be found on the EEA homepage.
Extended Abstract
We build a computational model of heterogeneous agents playing a public good game on a dynamic network. In public good games the unique Nash equilibrium leads to a suboptimal pro- vision of public goods. Giving rewards to contributors transforms the game but gives rise to a second-order dilemma. By allowing for coevolution of strategies and network structure the adaptive dynamics operate on both structure and strategy. Agents learn with whom to interact and how to act and can overcome the second-order dilemma. The key variable of interest is the long-run frequency of contribution to the public good.
The public good game with rewards is a two-stage game where agents choose to contribute to the public good in the first stage and have the possibility to give rewards to direct neighbors in the second stage. Rewards are assigned based on both social distance and the quality of the contribution. We consider different network topologies under different imitation strategies with syncronous and asyncronous updating and analyze their impact on the long-run frequency of contributions to the public good.
Evolutionary models with local interactions on static networks have been discussed analyt- ically (see Eshel et al. (1998) for a circle network, Albin and Foley (2001) and Nowak and May (1993) for a two-dimensional lattice, and Watts (1999, chapter 8 ) for small-world networks). Dy- namic networks have recently been discussed by Skyrms and Pemantle (2000), Alexander (2007, chapter 3.5) and Jun and Sethi (2009). We build on this literature by examining the long-run frequency of cooperation in public good games with rewards played on dynamic, directed networks.
The model captures several stylized facts:
- In modern societies people can, at least to some extent, select their partners. Links may be altered when individuals move to another neighborhood, city or country. We take this into account by allowing the network to evolve. Specifically, we allow agents to break a link with a direct neighbor if this link becomes weak relative to the agent’s other links.
- The effect of rewards on prosocial behavior has been discussed theoretically (Ellingsen and Johannesson, 2007; Benabou and Tirole, 2006; Brennan and Pettit, 2000; Hollaender, 1990) and experimentally (Masclet et al., 2003; Gaechter and Fehr, 1999). In our model rewards create a selective incentive for contribution. They strengthen the links between contributors so that the benefits of the rewards are enjoyed primarily be cooperators and prosocial behavior can survive selectionary pressure.
- If the quality of other agent’s contributions is observable agents with higher abilities will be more likely to receive rewards. This creates an endogeneous feedback mechanism inducing skilled agents to contribute more often. Agents with low ability will eventually stop contributing and individual agents self-select.
References
- Albin, Peter S. and Duncan K. Foley, “The Co-Evolution of Cooperation and Complexity in a Multi-player, local-interaction Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Complexity, 2001, 6 (3), 54–63.
- Alexander, Jason McKenzie, The Structural Evolution of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Benabou, Roland and Jean Tirole, “Incentives and Prosocial Behavior,” American Economic Review, 2006, 96 (5), 1652–1678.
- Brennan, Geoffrey and Phillip Pettit, “The hidden economy of esteem,” Economics and Philosophy, 2000, 16 (1), 77–98.
- Ellingsen, Tore and Magnus Johannesson, “Paying Respect,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2007, 21 (4), 135–149.
- Eshel, Ilan, Larry Samuelson, and Avner Shaked, “Altruists, Egosists, and Hooligans in a Local Interaction Model,” American Economic Review, 1998, 88 (1), 157–179. Gaechter, Simon and Ernst Fehr, “Collective action as a social exchange,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1999, 39 (4), 341–369.
- Hollaender, Heinz, “A Social Exchange Approch to Voluntary Cooperation,” American Economic Review, 1990, 80 (5), 1157–1167.
- Jun, Tackseung and Rajiv Sethi, “Reciprocity in evolving social networks,” Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2009, 119 (3), 379–396.
- Masclet, David, Charles Noussair, Steven Tucker, and Marie-Claire Villeval, “Monetary and Non- monetary Punishment in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism,” American Economic Review, 2003, 93 (1), 366–380.
- Nowak, Martin A. and Robert M. May, “The spatial dilemmas of evolution,” International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, 1993, 3 (1), 35–78.
- Skyrms, Brian and Robin Pemantle, “A Dynamic Model of Social Network Formation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000, 97 (16), 9340–9346.
- Watts, Duncan J., Small Worlds – The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness Princeton Studies in Complexity, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Temporary Crisis or Paradigm Shift?
October 19, 2009
What’s wrong with economic theory asked The Economist in July 2009. Since then a lot of ink has been spilled on this issue. The most stimulating discussion — in my opinion — is Colander, Föllmer, Haas, Goldberg, Juselius, Kirman, Lux and Sloth who have written in more detail about the failure of the economic profession in terms of a misallocation of research efforts and the failure to communicate the limitations of the standard macro-models. Their paper is available at IDEAS.
In the UK her majesty the Queen asked how economists could not see the crisis coming and reactions to the question came from Geoffrey Hodgson and colleagues and Tim Besley and colleagues. In a nutshell, Besley tells us that the economists “lost sight of the bigger picture” while Hodgson blames a prefernce for mathematical technique over real-world substance.
In Germany there has been some kind of Methodenstreit which is summarized in Carta. More details are on Rudi Bachmann’s homepage. For those who understand German, the plea for economic policy, as seperated from economic theory and more oriented towards the real world, signed by about onehundred German economists and published in FAZ (5. Mai 2009, Rettet die Wirtschaftspolitik). A comment on the FAZ-article appeared in Handelsblatt, and, as far as I know, there was a session about this at the annual meeting of the Verein fuer Socialpolitik.
Last but not least, the activist magazine Adbusters launched an issue on Though Control in Economics, which is nice for bedtime reading but the criticisms (for example the neglect of environmental degradation) are, I think, familiar to economists.
As I navigate trough the web I’m trying to collect the different pieces and sort the various claims of the debate, and this post is a first attempt in this direction. As I’m trying to get my head around it, three questions emerged:
- Nature of the crisis: How was the misallocation of research efforts possible? How can so many smart economists fail to come up with models that can explain the current crisis? I think this is a question that can only be answered by looking at the sociology of the profession.
- Implications for teaching: How will the economics curriculum change? Are we going to to give our students a copy of Keynes’ General Theory or are we continuing to teach economics as applied mathematics?
- Implications for economics: How far does the current situation challenge the core of mainstream economics? Is this just a temporary crisis for economic theory that will go away after a while, or is it the beginning of a larger shift in how we think about economics?
It will take a few years to find the answer to the third question but questions #1 and #2 should be discussed and I hope that I can find some time to think about them more deeply.
