Dresden 2003 – scientific programme

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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AKSOE 4: Mikro-ökonomische Modelle und Multi-Agenten-Systeme

AKSOE 4.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 25, 2003, 09:30–10:15, BAR/205

Social Coagulation: Power Law Distributions of Business Firm Sizes — •Robert Axtell — The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036, USA

I will describe data on business firm sizes in the U.S. and other countries. These data are very skew, both for publicly traded firms as well as privately held ones. Simple stochastic processes that generate such skew distributions will be reviewed. Then a multi-agent systems model that also yields empirically-significant distributions of firm sizes will be described. This model is written at the level of individuals and features unstable Nash equilibria. Essentially, individuals self-organize into productive teams in order to gain welfare from the economy.