| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.06 MB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The institution of money can be seen as a foundational social
mechanism providing communities with the ability to quantify the
results of economic processes and collectively regulate independent activities
of production and trade – money can be said, indeed, to constitute
the micro-macro link in economics. As such, investigations of money’s
role in the economy can be fruitfully combined with the tools of social
simulation. This paper revisits some of the main positions taken in the
contested landscape of monetary theory, evaluating how they might serve
as a foundation for the development of a new generation of conceptual
and empirical agent-based models.We start out by presenting a comparative
review of the way different intellectual traditions in mainstream economics,
heterodox economics, and economic sociology attempt to specify
the nature of money as an institution and clarify its role in the economy.
We extract the key "concepts of money" that each approach emphasizes,
paying especially close attention to the contrast between the sociology
of money and the microfoundations-related traditions in economics (focusing
on "money is memory" models, search-theory and mechanism design).
We then review the current literature applying agent-based modeling
to questions surrounding the nature of money, assessing some of the
main contributions from the perspectives of generative epistemology and
of the key concepts identified above. We conclude by indicating different
research directions in which we believe agent-based models, in combination
with the sociology of money, still have the potential to provide new
answers to old questions in monetary theory: by clarifying convergence
processes related to money of account, by illustrating the formation of
economic structure through symbolic mediation, by constructing tools
for analyses of intersubjectivity and coordination, or by providing formal
generalization to the social-monetary patterns that are currently
being revealed in the wealth of empirical data originating from digital
complementary currencies and new histories of money.
Description
Keywords
monetary theory agent-based modeling economic sociology
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Ferraciolli, Eduardo e Tanya Araújo (2023). "Agent-based modeling and the sociology of money : a framework for the study of coordination and plurality". REM Working paper series, nº 0285/2023
Publisher
ISEG - REM - Research in Economics and Mathematics