Workshop on Modeling the Financial Crisis from the Bottom Up

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Conventional financial and macroeconomic models have been demonstrated to be of limited utility in either forecasting, limiting, or remedying the current financial downturn. This workshop will focus on complexity-theoretic alternatives to traditional DSGE macroeconomic models. Specifically, agent-based approaches for building large-scale, distributed models of economic phenomena at the country-level will be highlighted. Attendees will discuss priorities for basic research to make progress toward useful models most expeditiously and explore plans for coordinating to develop next-generation modeling of economies. Participants will come from economics and finance, computer science and multi-agent systems, and physics, as well as public and private sector model users. Even a slight improvement in our ability to model the economy would have valuable implications for better policy making and mroe robust economies. Also: methodological advances in complexity modeling that apply to economies will also be useful for modeling other important complex entities, like political systems, organizational systems, and systems.