Re: [Fis] Artificial Markets

Dear FIS colleagues,

Very briefly, a couple of points expanding my previous posting. But first
of all, Luis, thanks a lot for rounding up the discussion: I think we
needed that separation between themes. In what follows I will keep up with
the track three--Markets Formal Processing.

Apart from the fresh ideas just brought in by Karl (I am still digesting
them), we have to consider all the analytic stuff produced under the 'Santa
Fe' guidelines --complexity views. For instance, selforganized criticality
by Per Bak in economic competition ('market selection'), or the application
to economy of the adaptive (fitness) landscapes developed by Stuart
Kauffman. And also the econo-physics approach championed by Mandelbrot and
others (scaling and fractals in markets and finances). Although in general
those approaches are just 'fishing out' for mathematical/dynamic patterns
and do not much care about fundamental (or foundational) problems, I think
we have to deal with them too.

There is also an idea introduced by late Gordon Scarrott ("The formulation
of a Science of Information: An Engineering Perspective on the Natural
Properties of Information", posthumously published in Cybernetics & Human
Knowledge, Vol. 5, 4, pp. 7-17,1998) about the appearance of power laws in
distribution of incomes, formation of prices, market competition, etc.,
that looks quite intriguing. The final phenomenon detected would be a very
generic number of 'social commitments' (within a social network) situated
behind every economic agent. Maybe this type of explanation puts in a
larger context the empirical phenomenon called 'notary rule' by Antonio
Valero (new in this list) and JM Naredo. When buying an apartment, for
instance, the 'labor' of the notary --just its signature-- is priced
thousand of times higher than the labor of the construction workers doing
the physical job. The closest we approach to the handling of natural
resources, the toughest becomes this notary rule...

best greetings

Pedro

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Received on Fri Nov 7 11:38:25 2003