PS 793, Fall 2008

Professor Robert Axelrod

Email: axe@umich.edu
Office Hours::Tuesdays 2 4 at 4116 Weill

Complexity Theory in the Social Sciences

Complexity theory is a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding dynamic
processes involving the interaction of many actors. A primary methodology of
complexity theory is agent-based modeling. Agent-based modeling involves specifying
how individual agents (such as people, nations, or organizations) interact with each other
and with their environment. Computer simulation is then used to discover the emergent
properties of the model, and thereby gain insights into dynamic processes that would be
too difficult to model with standard mathematical techniques.
Agent-based modeling provides a third way of doing science in addition to the
traditional methods of deduction and induction. Like deductive models, an agent-based
model starts with a well-defined set of assumptions. But unlike deductive models, an
agent-based framework is capable of revealing consequences through simulation that
cannot be deduced with standard mathematical techniques. And like induction, the main
method of finding these consequences (and perhaps new insights) is through analysis of a
set of data - in this case data generated by running the computer simulation. The goal is
to discover new principles about the dynamics of complex systems, especially complex
adaptive systems that are typical of social processes. There is no need to assume
rationality.
The course will consider a wide variety of applications of agent-based models to
the social sciences, including residential segregation, revolution, social influence, urban
growth, war, alliances, organizational change, elections, and stock markets. Among the
issues to be examined across models are: path dependence, sensitivity to initial
conditions, emergence of self-organized structure, adaptation to a changing environment,
co-evolution, information cascades, and criteria for judging the value of an agent-based
model.
The grade will be based on four exercises (5% each), class participation (20%),
the research design for the project (10%), and the project report (50%)
The four exercises are due at 8 am:
Sept. 15 Exercise 1: Tipping
Sept .22 Exercise 2: Tipping, continued
Sept 29 Exercise 3: Extending the cultural model
Oct.. 6
Exercise 4. Choose either 4. Standing ovation or 5.Human wave
Dec. 15 Project Report

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This syllabus is on the web with live links at https://ctools.umich.edu/portal and

my personal web page http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/. The items with long
descriptions are excerpted from Axelrod, Robert and Leigh Tesfatsion. "Guide for
Newcomers to Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences," in Leigh Tesfatsion and
Kenneth L. Judd and (Eds.), Handbook of Computational Economics, Vol. 2: AgentBased Computational Economics, Handbooks in Economics Series, North-Holland,
forthcoming 2006. http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/abmread.htm
Knowledge of a programming language (such as Visual Basic, C++ or Java) is
required. An easy language to learn and use for agent-based modeling is NetLogo which
can be downloaded at no cost from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
Some basic statistics will be helpful, but is not required.
The course is intended for graduate students in a wide variety of fields, not just
political science.
Office hours are Office hours: Tuesdays 2 4 at 4116 WeillThe phone number is
763-0099. I can also be reached on e-mail at axe@umich.edu. My personal web page is
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/
Every student should buy John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, 2007. Complex
Adaptive Systems (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press). The rest of the readings
can be found under Resources in the Course Tools site for this course:
https://ctools.umich.edu/portal.

Required Reading;
Week 2. Introduction. September 9.
Miller and Page, Chapters 1 and 2.
Vicsek, Tamas, Complexity: The Bigger Picture, Nature 418, 131 (2002).
Week 3. Computational Modeling. September 16.
Miller and Page, Chapters 3-6
Ross A. Hammond and Robert Axelrod, 2006. The Evolution of Ethnocentric
Behavior, Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 50, pp.926-936.
Axelrod, Robert, 2004. Modeling Security Issues of Central Asia, Report for
CMT International. Read pages 1-14 and skim the rest.

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Week 4. Adaptation. September 23

Miller and Page, Chapters 7 and 8, and pages 214-15.
Callahan, Paul, What is the Game of Life? Read the text, play with the program,
and study the R-pentomino.http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html
Kennedy, James, 1998. Thinking Is Social: Experiments with the Adaptive Culture
Model, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42, pp. 56-76.
Albin, Peter and Duncan K. Foley, 1992. "Decentralized, Dispersed Exchange
Without and Auctioneer: A Simulation Study, Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization, 18, pp. 27-51. Albin and Foley simulate pure exchange among
geographically dispersed utility-seeking agents with endowments of two distinct types of
goods, and with bounds to rationality and calculation. Exchange is entirely decentralized.
The authors show that this decentralized exchange process achieves a substantial
improvement in trader welfare relative to randomly allocated goods.

Week 5. Social Dynamics. September 30.

Miller and Page, Chapter 9.
Bennett, D. Scott, 2008.Governments, Civilians, and the Evolution of
Insurgency: Modeling the Early Dynamics of Insurgencies. Journal of Artificial
Societies and Social Simulation. Forthcoming. Note: Code is available at the authors
website.
Granovetter, Mark, 1978. "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior," American
Sociological Review, 83, pp. 1420-42. Threshold models are a class of mathematically
tractable models that do not require ABM to determine the global behavior that will
emerge from individual choices. In a threshold model, the key specification is each
agent's threshold for each of its possible actions, i.e., the proportion of agents who must
prefer to take a particular action before the given agent will prefer to take this action.
Granovetter develops a threshold model in which each agent has the same two alternative
actions and the thresholds for these actions differ across agents. For a given frequency
distribution of thresholds, the model calculates the equilibrium number of agents taking
each action. One suggested application is to civil violence, in which each agent must
decide whether or not to join a riot. It is interesting to compare Granovetter's threshold
model outcomes to the richer outcomes obtained for an agent-based model of insurgency
in the article by D. Scott Bennett.
Arthur, W. Brian, 1988. "Urban Systems and Historical Path Dependence," in
Jese H. Ausubel and Robert Herman (eds.), Cities and Their Vital Systems. Washington
DC: National Academy Press, pp. 85-97.
Farmer, J. Doyne, and Andrew W. Lo, 1999. Frontiers of Finance: Evolution and
Efficient Markets, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 96. pp. 1991-2.

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Week 6. Evolution. October 7, to be rescheduled.

Miller and Page, Chapters 10 and 11.
Holland, John H. 1992 (July). "Genetic Algorithms," Scientific American, 267,
pp. 66-72. The genetic algorithm is a search technique inspired by the evolutionary
effectiveness of mutation and differential reproduction. The algorithm provides a
convenient way to model agents of limited rationality that adapt and/or evolve over time.
Each agent might be responding to a fixed environment, or to an every-changing social
environment consisting of many agents who are continually adapting to each other. The
article by Rick Riolo in the same issue shows how to incorporate a genetic algorithm in
one's own agent-based model.
(If you are not familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, read Robert Axelrod, 1984.
The Evolution of Cooperation, New York, Basic Books, pp. 3-69 and 158-68.)
Riolo, Rick L., 1992 (July). Survival of the Fittest Bits, Scientific American,
267, pp. 89-91.
Axelrod, Robert, 1987. "The Evolution of Strategies in the Iterated Prisoner's
Dilemma, In Lawrence Davis (ed.), Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing,
London: Pitman, and Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 32-41. Reprinted in Robert
Axelrod, 1997. The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition
and Collaboration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 11-29.
Henrich, Joseph, et al., May 2001. In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral
experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies, The American Economic Review, 91, pp 7378. The authors run experiments in different cultures to see how people make choices.
The authors use the Ultimatum Game in which two players are offered a chance to win a
certain sum of money. One player, the proposer, gets to offer a portion of the sum to the
other player, retaining the rest. The second player gets to accept or reject the offer, with
rejection resulting in no money for either player. The rational (i.e. short term, egoist),
solution is for the proposer to offer as little as possible and for the other player to accept.
The experiments show that the rational solution is rarely observed in any of the cultures.
When people in different societies actually play the game, they tend to be fair rather than
rational.
Nowak, Martin A., Karen M. Page, and Karl Sigmund, 8 September 2000.
Fairness Versus Reason in the Ultimatum Game, Science, 289, pp. 1773-75. The
authors employ evolutionary dynamics to explain how this "irrational" anchoring on fair
shares might have evolved among humans in part through a rational concern for
reputation. Specifically, accepting low offers, if generally known and remembered,
increases the chances of receiving low offers in subsequent encounters; and making low
offers becomes irrational if low offers are not accepted.
Week 7. Building Your Own Agent-Based Model. October 7, to be rescheduled.
Miller and Page, Chapter 12, Epilogue, Appendix A and Appendix B.
LeBaron, Blake, 2002. "Building the Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market" Working
Paper, Brandeis University. LeBaron provides an insider's look at the construction of the

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Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market model. He considers the many design questions that
went into building the model from the perspective of a decade of experience with agentbased financial markets. He also provides an assessment of the model's overall strengths
and weaknesses. Santa Fe Stock Market Demonstration Software (html) . Other
Introductory ABM Materials on Market Design (html), Industrial Organization (html),
Multiple-Market Systems (html), and Automated Markets for Internet Commerce (html).
Week 8, No Class, Fall Break. October 21.
Week 9. Complexity Theory. October 28.
The research design is due for those presenting on week 9.
Simon, Herbert (1982), "The Architecture of Complexity", pp. 193-230 in Herbert
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, Second Edition, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA...Simon informally defines a "complex system" to be a system made up of a large
number of parts that interact in a non-simple way. He considers a number of complex
systems encountered in the behavioral sciences, from families to formal organizations,
and describes features that are common in a wide variety of such systems. His central
theme (p. 196) is that "complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy and that
hierarchic systems have some common properties independent of their specific content."
He discusses the design advantages of nearly decomposable subsystems with a
hierarchical organization of their parts. He also conjectures that complex systems evolve
from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms along the
way, hence evolution favors hierarchic over non-hierarchic systems.
Gell-Mann, Murray, 1995. "What is Complexity?" Complexity, 1, pp. 16-19.
Alternative ways to conceptualize and measure complexity are described.
Arthur, W. Brian. 1993. "Why Do Things Become More Complex? Scientific
American, May, p 144.
The research design is due for those presenting after November 4.
Weeks 10- 13. Student presentations of their research. November 4 to December 9.
Project report is due noon December 16.

Optional Further Readings

1. Introduction to Complexity Theory.
Krugman, Paul, 1996. The Self-Organizing Economy, Malden, MA: Blackwell,
pp. 16-21. On Schellings residential segregation model.

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Resnick, Mitchel 1994. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in

Massively Parallel Microworlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p 3-19 on decentralization,
and 129-44 on decentralized mind set.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order
and Chaos. Touchstone Books. 1993.
Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control. Addison Wesley, 1996.
Axelrod, Robert and Michael Cohen, Harnessing Complexity. Free Press, 2000.
Johnson, Steven, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and
Software. Scribner, 2001.
Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, W.W. Norton &
Company, 2003.
Holland, John, 1995. Hidden Order. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 1-40 on
elements of a complex adaptive system.
2. Agent-Based Modeling.
Axelrod, Robert. Agent-Based Modeling as a Bridge Between Disciplines, in
Leigh Tesfatsion and Kenneth L. Judd and (Eds.), Handbook of Computational
Economics, Vol. 2: Agent-Based Computational Economics, Handbooks in Economics
Series, North-Holland, 2006.
Kelly, Kevin, 1994. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social
Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 22-25 and 46872.
Epstein, Joshua M. and Robert A. Axtell, 1996, Growing Artificial Societies:
Social Science from the Bottom Up. Washington, DC: Brookings and Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, especially pp. 1-53 and 94-137. (Note: the figures are best viewed in color.)
Gilbert, Nigel, 1999. Simulation, A New Way of Doing Science, American
Behavioral Scientist, 42, August, pp. 1485-87. An introduction to a special issue of useful
articles.
Adaptive Agents, Intelligence, and Emergent Human Organization: Capturing
Complexity through Agent-Based Modeling. A special issue of Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
USA, Vol. 99 (Supp. 3). May 14 2002, http://www.pnas.org/content/vol99/suppl_3/
Cusack, Thomas R. and Richard Stoll. 1990. Exploring Realpolitik: Probing
International Relations Theory with Computer Simulation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Macy, Michael W., and Robert Willer (2002), "From Factors to Actors:
Computational Sociology and Agent-Based Modeling", Annual Review of Sociology,
Vol. 28, pp. 143-166. While written for sociologists, this review article should be of
value to all agent-based modelers. It places ABM in its historical context, explains its
meaning and goals, provides many good examples, and offers useful advice to those who
want to try it for themselves.
3. Adoption.
March, James G. 1978. "Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of
Choice," Bell Journal of Economics, 9, pp. 587-607.

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Cohen, Michael D., James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, 1972. "A Garbage Can
Model of Organizational Choice," Administrative Science Quarterly, 17, pp. 1-25.
Carley, Kathleen, 1991. "A Theory of Group Stability," American Sociological
Review, 56, pp. 331-54.
Holland, John H. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. The MIT
Press, 1995.
Cohen, Michael D., Rick L. Riolo, and Robert Axelrod, 2001. The Role of
Social Structure in the Maintenance of Cooperative Regimes, Rationality and Society,
13, pp. 5-32.
Tesfatsion, Leigh (1997) ``How Economists Can Get A-Life'' in The Economy as
a Complex Evolving System II W. Brian Arthur, Steven Durlauf, and David Lane eds. pp
533-565. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA.
Cederman, Lars-Erik, 1997. Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and
Nations Develop and Dissolve. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), especially
pp. 184-212 and 219-22.
Cederman, Lars-Erik, Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a
Macrohistorical Learning Process. American Political Science Review, 1995, vol. 95, pp
5-31.
Cederman, Lars-Erik, 1994. "Emergent Polarity: Analyzing State-Formation and
Power Politics," International Studies Quarterly, 38, especially pp. 501-33.
Cederman, Lars-Erik, 2001. "Nationalist Systems Change and its Geographic
Consequences, Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, San Francisco., August 30-September 2, 2001. Note: You may skim
the appendix.
Cederman, Lars-Erik. Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to
Sandpiles. American Political Science Review. 2002 Nov; 97(1):19-59. Power-law
distributions, scaling laws, and self-organized criticality are features of many frequency
distributions, from word usage to avalanches, and from firms to cities. A set of events is
said to behave in accordance with a power law distribution if large events are rarer than
small events, and specifically if the frequency of an event is inversely proportional to its
size. An example is the distribution of the sizes of wars. Cederman uses an agent-based
model of war and state formation in the context of technological change to account for
this observed regularity. His paper is a good example of how a fairly complicated model
and its implications can be clearly presented, with details left to an appendix.
Laver, Michael. Policy and the Dynamics of Party Competition. American
Political Science Review. 2005; 99(2):263-281.
Sargent, Thomas, 1993. Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
.

4. Social Dynamics
Epstein, Joshua M., Modeling Civil Violence: An Agent-Based Computational
Approach. 2002. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; 99(3):7243-7250.
Epstein uses a spatial agent-based model to explore civil violence. A central authority
uses "cops" to arrest (remove) actively rebelling citizens from the society for a specified
jail term. In each time step, each agent (cop or citizen) randomly moves to a new
unoccupied site within its limited vision. A rebelling citizen's estimated arrest probability
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is assumed to fall as the ratio of actively rebelling citizens to cops that the citizen
perceives in its vicinity increases. Each citizen in each time step decides whether to
actively rebel or not depending on this perceived ratio. Epstein shows how the complex
dynamics resulting from these simple assumptions can generate empirically interesting
macroscopic regularities that are difficult to analyze using more standard modeling
approaches. An unverified version of this Rebellion model is available in NetLogo.
Carpenter, Daniel, David Lazer, and Kevin Esterling, 2003. The Strength of
Strong Ties: A Model of Contract Making in Policy Networks with Evidence from U.S.
Health Policies, Rationality and Society, 15(4), pp. 411-440.
Axelrod, Robert, 1997. "The Dissemination of Culture: A Model with Local
Convergence and Global Polarization," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41, pp. 203-26.
Reprinted in Robert Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of
Competition and Collaboration, 1997. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 14577.
Latane, Bibb, Andrzej Nowak and James H. Liu. 1994. "Measuring Emergent
Social Phenomena: Dynamism, Polarization and Clustering as Order Parameters of Social
Systems," Behavioral Science, 39, p. 1-24.
Lustig, Ian, et al., 2004. Secessionism in Multicultural Settings, American
Political Science Review, 98, pp. 209-229.
Morikawa, Tomonori, John Orbell and Audun S. Runde, 1995. "The Advantage
of Being Moderately Complex, American Political Science Review, 89, pp. 601-11.
(On achieving cooperation even in one move Prisoner's Dilemmas through local
interaction.)
Kollman, Ken, John H. Miller, and Scott E. Page, 1992. "Adaptive Parties in
Spatial Elections," American Political Science Review, 86, pp. 929-37.
Schrodt, Philip, "Conflict as a Determinant of Territory," Behavioral Science, 26,
1981, pp. 37-50.
Kollman, et al., 1997. Political Institutions and Sorting in a Tiebout Model, The
American Economic Review, 87, pp. 977ff.
Lux T., and M. Marchesi, Scaling and Criticality in a Stochastic Multi-Agent
Model of a Financial Model, Nature, 397 (6719): 498-500, Feb. 11, 1999. See also
articles that cite this article for additional stock market models.
Krugman, Paul, 1993. "On the Number and Location of Cities," European
Economic Review, 37, pp. 293-8.
Arthur, W. Brian, 1995. "Complexity in Economic and Financial Markets,"
Complexity, 1, pp. 20-25.
Lesourne, Jacques, 1992. The Economics of Order and Disorder: The Market as
Organizer and Creator. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lohmann, Susanne, 1994. The Dynamics of Information Cascades: The Monday
Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91, World Politics, 47, p. 42-?
5. Evolution.
Gintis, Herbert, Game Theory Evolving (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000).
Bowles, Samuel, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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Axelrod, Robert, 1997. Complexity of Cooperation, Chapter 3 on coping with

misperception and misunderstandings in the iterated Prisoners Dilemma.
Lindgren, Kristian, 1991. "Evolutionary Phenomena in Simple Dynamics," in C.
G. Langton et al. (eds.), Artificial Life II, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Lindgren, Kristian and Mats G. Nordahl, Cooperation and Community Structure
in Artificial Ecosystems, in Chris Langton (ed.), Artificial Life: An Overview
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 15-37. (Includes spatial PD, explicit resource
flows, predatory interactions, and food webs.)
Axtell, Robert, Joshua Epstein, and H. Peyton Young, The Emergence of Classes
in a Multi-Agent Bargaining Model, Center for Social and Economic Dynamics,
Washington, D. C. Working Paper 9. The paper and the model itself are available at
http://www.brook.edu/ES/dynamics/papers/classes/
Rilling, J. K., Gutman, D. A., Zeh, T. R., Pagnoni, G., Berns, G. S., & Kilts, C. D.
(2002). A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation. Neuron, 35, 395-405. See also NY Times
story by N. Angier on this research, July 23, 2002.
Axelrod, Robert, 1995. "A Model of the Emergence of New Political Actors" in
Nigel Gilbert and Rosaria Conte (eds.), Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of
Social Life. London: University College Press, 1995, pp. 19-39. Reprinted in Robert
Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and
Collaboration, 1997. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 121-144.
Riolo, Rick L. Michael D. Cohen, and Robert Axelrod, 22 November 2001.
Evolution of Cooperation without Reciprocity, Nature, 414.
Ferriere, Regis, 11 June1998. Help and You Shall Be Helped, Nature, 393, pp.
517-9.
Nowak, Martin A. and Karl Sigmund, 11 June 1998. Evolution of Indirect
Reciprocity by Image Scoring, Nature, 393, pp. 573-7.
6. Building Your Own Agent-Based Model
LeBaron, Blake, 2000. Agent-Based Computational Finance: Suggested
Readings and Early Research, Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control, 24, pp. 679702.
Ray J. Paul, George M. Giaglis, and Vlatka Hlupic, 1999. Simulation of
Business Processes, American Behavioral Scientist, 42, pp. 1551-76.
Palmer, R.G. , W. B. Arthur, H. Holland et al,. Artificial Economic Life- A
Simple Model of the Stock Market." Physica D. 75 (1-3): 264-274 Aug. 1, 1994. See also
articles that cite this article for additional stock market models.
Mathematica source code from Gaylord, Richard J. and Louis J. DAndria, 1998.
Simulating Society: A Mathematica Toolkit for Modeling Socioeconomic Behavior
(NY): www.telospub.com
NetLogo has dozens of documented, runnable, and easily modified agent based
models in its on-line library.
Runnable models with source code in Java:
A. from Brookings Center on Social and Economic Dynamics using
Ascape. See http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/models/ascape/ page not available

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B. from University of Chicago group, using RePast. This includes Epstein

and Axtells sugarscape model: http://repast.sourceforge.net/
C. Axtell, The Emergence of Firms in a Population of Agents: Local
Increasing Returns, Unstable Nash Equilibria, and Power Law Size Distributions,
Brooking Institutions, CSED Working Paper No. 3, June 1999. A commentary in Nature
is at http://www.nature.com/nsu/010913/010913-2.html The paper itself with a Java
simulation on the Brookings Institution web site.
7. Complexity Theory
A. Meaning of Complexity
Waldrop, Mitchell, 1992. Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order
and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster on the evolution of chaos theory into
complexity theory, some applications to social sciences, and the history of the Santa Fe
Institute.
Holland, John H., 1995. Hidden Order, rest of book.
Holland, John H., 1998. Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley).
Gell-Mann, Murray, 1994. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple
and the Complex. New York: Freeman.
Lansing, Stephen, and James Kremer, 1993. "Emergent Properties of Balinese
Water Temple Networks: Coadaptation on a Rugged Fitness Landscape," American
Anthropologist, 95, pp. 97-114. Over hundreds of years, Balinese farmers have
developed an intricate hierarchical network of "water temples" dedicated to agricultural
deities in parallel with physical transformations of their island deliberately undertaken to
make it more suitable for growing irrigated rice. The water temple network plays an
instrumental role in the coordination of activities related to rice production.
Representatives of different water temple congregations meet regularly to decide
cropping patterns, planting times, and water usage, thus helping to synchronize harvests
and control pest populations. Lansing and Kremer develop an ecological simulation
model to illuminate the system-level effects of the water temple network, both social and
ecological. Their anthropological study illustrates many important ABM concepts,
including emergent properties, fitness landscapes, co-adaptation, and the effects of
different institutional designs.
B. Fitness Landscapes
Kauffman, Stuart, 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of SelfOrganization and Complexity, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 16975 on background on his N-K landscapes.
Axelrod, Robert and D. Scott Bennett, 1993. "A Landscape Theory of
Aggregation", British Journal of Political Science, 23, pp. 211-33. . Reprinted in Robert
Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and
Collaboration, 1997. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 69-94.

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Axelrod, Robert, Will Mitchell, Robert E. Thomas, D. Scott Bennett, and Erhard
Bruderer, 1995. "Coalition Formation in Standard-Setting Alliances,", Management Science,
41, pp. 1493-1508. Reprinted in Robert Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: AgentBased Models of Competition and Collaboration, 1997. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press). This is another test of Axelrod and Bennetts landscape model.
C. Cousins of Complexity.
1. Chaos
Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987. New York and London:
Penguin Books, pp. 1-31, and 98-9.
Crutchfield, James P. et al., 1986. "Chaos," Scientific American, 255, December,
pp. 46-57.
Williams, Garnett P. 1997. Chaos Theory Tamed, Washington, DC: Joseph Henry
Press, 1997, pp. 161-73. On the logistic equation and control parameters.
2.. Self-Organized Criticality
Bak, Per and Kan Chen, January 1991. "Self-Organized Criticality," Scientific
American, pp. 46-53.
Bak, Per. 1996. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality.
New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 1-32, 135-43, and 183-92.
3. Cellular Automata
Mitchell, Melanie, 4 Oct 2002. Is the Universe a Universal Computer? Review
of A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram Science, Volume 298, Number 5591,
pp. 65-68. Available from http://www.sciencemag.org/
Wolfram, Stephen, A New Kind of Science, 2002. Campaign, IL: Wolfram
Media.
4. Neural Nets
Coveney, Peter and Roger Highfield, 1995. Frontiers of Complexity: the Search
for Order in a Chaotic World, New York: Fawcett Columbine, pp. 130-149 on neural
nets.
Bailey, James, 1996. After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human
Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, pp. 127-35.
Chellapilla, Kumar and David B. Fogel. September 1999, Evolution, neural networks,
games, and intelligence. Proceedings of the IEEE, 87(9):1471--1496.

Complexity News
Complexity Digest is a weekly report covering all aspects of complexity. It
typically has abstracts of about 20 articles, as well as news about conferences and
opportunities. You can read it on-line at http://www.comdig.org/ or you can have it emailed to you each week.

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Reference material
1.Comprehensive site for agent-based modeling in the social sciences.
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm
2. Material on evolutionary theories in the social sciences: http://etss.net/
3. Special issues of The Computational Economics and The Journal of
Economic Dynamics and Control are devoted to agent-based models. Their introductions
are available at http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/surveys.htm#ACEspec
Opportunities
1. UMs Center for the Study of Complexity has many local activities.
http://www.pscs.umich.edu/
2. Many national and international workshops and meetings on complexity are
available. See http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/cfp.htm or the Complexity Digest
http://www.comdig.org/
3. The Santa Fe Institute is the world center for the study of complexity. See
http://www.santafe.edu/index.html For example, each summer SFI offers intensive
programs for advanced graduate students. One is for all fields (application deadline has
been in January of each year), and one is specifically for economic and closely related
fields, the Santa Fe Graduate Workshop in Economics. The application deadline not yet
set, but Professor Scott Page of UM should know the details.

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