Complexity Economics Lab at ASU / Projects

Projects

Our aim is to develop a true theory of cities as a complex system of systems, governed by multi-layered networks. While it is true that every city is unique, we believe there exist fundamental principles underlying the development and dynamics of all cities, and that those principles have parallels in other collective social entities across the domain of life (e.g. ant colonies).

Funders:

U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense

  • We employ basic principles governing ecosystem growth, such as diversification, generalization and expansion, to local economies to understand the drivers and requirements for economic growth.

References:

Jacobs, Jane. The economy of cities. Vintage, 2016

This project uses a complex systems framework to create theoretical and quantitative models of system resilience and stability, particularly economics systems. We argue that quantifying the interdependence among the networked components within a complex system can lead to quantified, system-level metrics of vulnerability and anticipatory metrics of resilience.

Funders:

Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, U.S. Economic Development Administration

  • We are developing a labour dynamics model based on the Labour Discipline Theory.
  • Firms and households have incomplete information, and firms have an understanding of household effort response curves captured by neural networks.
  • This project is primarily using individual based computational modeling.
  • The goal of this project is to explore the consequences of minimum
References:

Bowles, Samuel, and Robert Boyer. "Labor discipline and aggregate demand: a macroeconomic model." The American Economic Review 78.2 (1988): 395-400.

Akerlof, George A., and Janet L. Yellen. "The fair wage-effort hypothesis and unemployment." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 105.2 (1990): 255-283.

When extreme drought struck China’s main wheat-growing regions in 2011, it was not China that suffered food shortages, but far off countries like Egypt, which experienced widespread civil unrest and food riots. This was due partly to trade networks, which can transfer vulnerability from one country to another and, with it, political, social, and economic instability.

Funders:

Skoll Global Threats Fund

  • We are developing a series of ledger based models exploring banking, credit creation, debt demand and economic growth.
  • Inspired by the ‘Money View’ of Perry Mehrling, and worked in collaboration with researchers at the Global Climate Forum, Freie University and Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies.
  • Our primary methodology for this project is individual-based computa
References:

Mehrling, Perry. The New Lombard Street: how the Fed became the dealer of last resort. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Murau, Steffen, Joe Rini, and Armin Haas. "The evolution of the Offshore US-Dollar System: past, present and four possible futures." Journal of Institutional Economics (2020): 1-17.

This project seeks to explain the evolution of costly punishment, which, in turn, is often invoked an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. Our approach is to reconcile the concepts of economic and biological rationality - a duality arising through contrary views of rational agents as those that maximize absolute payoffs and those that maximize relative payoffs.

Funders:

U.S. National Science Foundation

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