Interaction and Market Structure: Essays on Heterogeneity in Economics (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems)

This book is a collection of essays which examine how the properties of aggregate variables are influenced by the actions & interactions of heterogenous individuals in different economic contexts. The common denominator of the essays is a critique of the representative agent hypothesis. If this hypothesis were correct, the behaviour of the aggregate variable would simply be the reproduction of individual optimising behaviour. In the methodology of the hard sciences, one of the achievements of the quantum revolution has been the rebuttal of the notion that aggregate behaviour can be explained on the basis of the behaviour of a single unit: the elementary particle does not even exist as a single entity but as a network, a system of interacting units. In this book, new tracks in economics which parallel the developments in physics mentioned above are explored. The essays, in fact are contributions to the analysis of the economy as a complex evolving system of interacting agents.Interaction and Market Structure: Essays on Heterogeneity in Economics (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems), Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2000 was published 2000 under ISBN 9783540669791 and ISBN 3540669795.