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Report on ESRC Conference on Diversity in Macroeconomics
New Perspectives from Agent-based Computational, Complexity and Behavioural Economics
24-25 February 2014
Hosted by ESRC and Economics Department
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, UK
1. Background
In September 2013, the ESRC gave the go ahead for a follow up conference to the 2012
ESRC and the Oxford Martin School International Scientific Symposium on
Macroeconomics. It was decided that 2014 conference be held at the University of Essex and
coordinated by Professor Sheri Markose with a Program Committee comprising of Paul De
Grauwe (London School of Economics), Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam), Sujit
Kapadia (Bank of England) and Paul Sanderson (ESRC). The conference was held over two
days of the 24 and 25 February 2014 at the Wivenhoe House Hotel of the University of
Essex.
The 2014 ESRC Diversity in Macroeconomics conference aimed to follow up on the
conclusions reached at the 2012 ESRC Oxford Symposium that “action is required to catalyse
new approaches to macroeconomic questions and help develop the discipline's responses,
perhaps in partnership with other disciplines within or beyond social science.” The 2007
economic crisis and its aftermath have revealed something of a mono-culture in established
macroeconomic models, which appear to lack relevance to the scale of the challenges posed
by the crisis and provide an inadequate tool-box to deal with ‘big data’, highly
interconnected real time systems and a largely protean and evolving financial, monetary and
industrial environment.
Developments from at least three new branches of economics were covered at the conference:
agent-based computational modelling, complexity theory and behavioural economics,
drawing on interdisciplinary studies of computational and digital technologies, complexity
sciences and neuro-physiology of the human brain relating to mimetic behaviours and
strategic innovation. Both the pragmatic and foundational aspects of these advances in
science were explored in relation to the apparent short comings in mainstream macroeconomics that predate the 2007 economic crisis. These relate to the interconnectedness of
the economy, procyclical herding behaviours and radical uncertainty arising from structure
changing innovations especially in the monetary and financial markets.
The 2014 ESRC conference made concerted efforts not only to take stock of what concrete
advances have been made by economists and other academics in the above new perspectives
but also to bring to the table established mainstream macroeconomists, some of whom have
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concluded, to quote Paul de Grauwe, that “much has to change in macro-economics for it to
be fit for purpose.”
As the shortcomings of academic research in macroeconomics and finance models have been
most keenly felt in recent years by those at the coal face of policy, they have been driving
much of the impetus for change. The conference was marked by an exceptionally high
presence of practitioners, from HM Treasury (James Richardson), IMF (Laura Kodres),
OECD (Luiz de Mello) and five central banks, including the Bank of England (Sujit Kapadia,
Oliver Burrows, David Bholat, David Miles, Tomohiro Ota), Reserve Bank of Australia
(Mark Manning) and the Federal Reserve (Neil Ericsson).
To widen access to new methods and to begin to address the skills gap in the training and
adoption of new computational, complexity and behavioural (including neuroscience)
methods to help in macroeconomic modelling and policy design, the event was publicized to
ESRC Doctoral students. However, there is currently limited research capacity in new tools
for operationalizing macroeconomic modelling that go beyond econometrics and micro social
simulations, with, for example, fewer than a dozen UK economists1 (and econo-physicists
based at the Oxford Martin and Cambridge INET units) pioneering non-mainstream agentbased macroeconomic models.
The conference was organized under 3 major themes with 7 sessions in total. There were 3
speakers in each session followed by a discussant and Q&A open to all. In addition, there
were also two themed panel discussions. The total number of ESRC sponsored/invited
speakers, discussants and other attendees was 43. In addition, there were a further 25 selffunded attendees bringing the total participants to 68.
2. Summary of Conference Proceedings
2.1 New Agent-based Macroeconomic Models and Holistic Network Models On
Interconnectedness
This part of the conference showcased a number of agent based macro-economic models and
also the need to adopt network methods to model interconnectedness of the system. The
advantage of agent-based computational economics (ACE) methods lies in the fact that
computer agents operating in artificial environments can depict institutional details and
behaviour rules of varying degrees of sophistication that need not be constrained by
previously specified equations. A ‘probe’ in an agent based model can reveal what drives
emerging dynamics and structures in a generative way rather than rely on statistical and
econometric inference for which large time series data sets are needed and which can be
prone to the Lucas critique.
In two sessions relating to New Macroeconomic Models and Management of Extreme
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The University of Essex is, perhaps, the only one in the UK with an Economics Department which offers extensive hands
on training at a postgraduate and PhD level for agent based computational economics and complexity economics. This has
come about with the new MSc Computational Economics, Financial Markets and Policy which was set up in 2013 by Sheri
Markose.
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Dynamics, speakers Paul de Grauwe, Doyne Farmer, Robert Axtel , Marco Raberto and
Klaus Schenke-Hoppe discussed how ACE models can generate boom and bust cycles from
endogenous micro-level activities of agents and also how ACE is well placed to build large
scale macro-economic models from multiple data bases that can represent a high degree of
granularity of the socio-economy represented in large data bases such as those derived from
by tax and employment records and census reports. These speakers hold the view that extant
macro-economic models cannot explain or generate boom bust dynamics because they are
equilibrium models in which problems arising from insolvency and illiquidity are not
modelled: they instead rely on large exogenous shocks to produce anything interesting
regarding extreme macro-economic dynamics.
The question de Grauwe asks, in the context of behavioural macro-economics, is how the
boom-bust dynamics with infrequent extreme GDP falls can be generated endogenously by a
model of ‘animal spirits’ with waves of optimism and pessimism about future growth. He
uses archetypes, of trend followers who exacerbate optimistic and pessimistic trends and
contrarians who anti-herd using a fundamental rule for asset valuation, first introduced in the
Santa Fe Institute artificial stock market model, to generate endogenous swings in a macroeconomic model. The Axtell ACE model, which advocates a 1-1 scale between firms and
households in economy and in the micro-data base driven macro-economic model, has no
credit markets and makes no behavioural assumptions such as animal spirits that have
become fashionable as the source of boom and bust in macroeconomic models. Doyne
Farmer’s micro-data driven housing model with Peter Howitt and John Geanakoplos and the
Marco Raberto ICE-ACE model have credit and housing markets but no explicit assumptions
about animal spirits to drive the macro-economic cycles. So not with-standing the claims by
ACE macro-economists for the absence of exogenous shocks to drive macro-economic
cycles, we have yet to identify the relative significance for factors at play and how they
interact. Do behavioural factors governing ‘animal spirits’ matter more than institutional
ones such as money and banking or structural factors which include the length of supply
chains in models of production and consumption ?
The general discussion picked up on the point made by Doyne Farmer that despite the
success of agent based models in other sciences, ranging from epidemiology, traffic
management and defence, there has been an absence of training or exposure to ACE models
in UK economic departments. In an era of widespread use of ICT technologies and the www
that rely on the programming of virtual realities as a routine method of inference and
knowledge acquisition, ACE remains a fringe activity among academic and policy oriented
economists. Doyne Farmer is of the view that unlike macro-econometrics and DSGE models,
not sufficient man hours have gone into ACE models for them to deliver well tested and
robust models that can be used by policy makers.
In the session On Holistic Systemic Risk Approach: Statistical and Structural Macro-nets,
speakers Marco Gross, Kathy Yuan and Simone Giansante gave three different modelling
approaches for analysing interconnectedness in macro-financial models. Due to the so called
volatility paradox (Borio and Dehrmann, 2009) by which the volatility of market indexes are
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underestimated during asset price booms, market price-based systemic risk indexes have been
found to be devoid of early warning signals as they are at best contemporaneous with the
emerging crises or at worst lag them. This is in contrast with the banking sector liabilitiesbased systemic risk indexes of Markose-Giansante in which the build-up of bank leverage
relative to capital can be tracked well in advance of a crisis. This led discussant Tomohiro
Ota and others to highlight the need for more research on the structural balance sheet network
approaches which are well geared to showing up negative externalities from leverage and
also on more comparative work on different systemic risk metrics. There was discussion on
the importance of developing a global macro-net model in which the interconnectedness in
global financial flows and imbalances faced by national banking systems can be linked back
to real side sectoral liabilities and imbalances within countries.
2.2 Challenges for Macro-economics from Institutional Transformations, Pecuniary
Externalities and Knightian Uncertainty
Talks by Charles Goodhart, Neil Ericsson and Mark Manning in the session Developing
Macroeconomics and Macro-Prudential Policy That is Fit For Purpose focussed on
whether extant macro-economic models which are devoid of institutional details are fit for
purpose for policy design and for making forecasts. Charles Goodhart prefaced his talk on
the challenges for macro-prudential policy by giving a historical perspective on Hyman
Minsky’s analysis that the achievement of price stability does not entail, and can even put at
greater risk, the maintenance of financial stability. The central bank has responsibility for
both, and indeed historically the latter had precedence, with the Gold Standard maintaining
price stability. Goodhart remarked on the lack of sanctions for financial regulators and central
bankers for having ignored this key function of central banks, leading the way to the biggest
financial crisis of all time.
The speed of transformation of the monetary and financial environment was noted by Neil
Ericsson as being a factor in the failure of macro-econometric models to ‘tell better stories’.
Ericsson elaborated on how complexity places impediments on testable hypotheses, because
strategic behaviour results in structure changes and regime switches that are manifested in
time-varying non-stationary distributions for variables of interest.
The main message from Mark Manning was that what traditional macroeconomists think is
remote from their domain of interest, viz. the organization of financial derivatives markets,
can have important implications for liquidity risk of the macro-financial system and also the
solvency of key banking and financial institutions.
Jagjit Chadha, the discussant, was keen to show how DSGE models can be improved to
incorporate a generic interbank market so that liquidity crunches can be modelled. Alistair
Milne, another discussant, said it is a waste of time to incorporate ‘bells and whistles’ into
new Keynesian DSGE models and that the representative agent calibration with aggregate
data (such as the risk aversion parameter) tells us next to nothing about whether the model
will help us to predict real world developments. He recommends the use of agent level micro
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data where possible and the avoidance of avoid Basel II type fallacies of composition that
hold that what is true for the individual is true for the system a whole.
In the session on Dealing with Complexity and Uncertainty in Macro Dynamics, Marcus
Miller and Lei Zhang referred to the work of economists like Stiglitz and Greenwald who
since 1976 had warned of the diverse forms of ‘pecuniary’ negative externalities, missing
markets and the role of transactions prices which may clear markets in temporary equilibria,
but can lead us astray too! Sujit Kapadia, in turn, discussed some implications of Knightian
uncertainty for policy design. Sujit Kapadia considered financial regulatory design that does
not exacerbate the self-reflexive loops in prudential regulation by making use of Gerd
Grigerenzer-inspired fast and frugal heuristics to assess and manage financial risk. He
discussed the case when Knightian uncertainty looms large under conditions of extreme
structure changes. Kapadia captures this using a model bias (arising from incorrect
distributional or functional assumptions) as opposed to a framework based on minimizing
mean square error in prediction and argued that accruing more and more past statistical
information need not add to the precision about novel structures or alternative distributions to
the one being assumed.
The science writer, Mark Buchanan, in the panel discussion similarly noted this flaw in
economic models for learning. Buchanan claims that learning in rational expectations in
macro-economic models or discussions of robust models are far off the mark as it is assumed
that the relevant structural forms are known and the only deviations from them are mere
white noise terms.
In the session on Economic Growth after Liquidity Trap and Bubble Economy: How to
Rebalance the Economy? Richard Werner, James Richardson and Oliver Burrows,
respectively, spoke about the challenges to monetary and fiscal policy that arise from
increasing sectoral imbalances following the growth of the financial sector and a monetary
environment in which over 97% of monetary aggregates are created by the private sector.
Oliver Burrows noted that less than 8% of total lending by financial institutions in the UK
goes to real private sector investments. In most G10 countries, excessive innovation in the
financial sector is are in marked contrast to a lack of investment and innovation in the real
economy. David Hales, a computer scientist, described the ICT peer-peer monetary systems
that could be a boon in solving collective commons problems and also represent a disruptive
transformational process that can curtail current financial intermediation arrangements.
Detailed studies of the monetary and fiscal transmission mechanisms with growing sectoral
imbalances and innovations are not part of mainstream macro and monetary models.
2.3Rationality, Herding and Radical Uncertainty: New Foundations for Social Cognition,
Complex Strategic Interaction and Phenotype for Diversity
The growing controversy that the text book model of rationality is either
computationally/logically impossible given the complex domain of many real world decision
problems or behaviourally infeasible given the way in which human social cognition has
evolved prompted the session New Foundations for Social and Strategic Interaction:
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Coordination, Anti-Coordination and Innovation. Leading neuro-scientists, Vittorio Gallese
and Scott Kelso, gave talks on the late 20th century discovery of mirror neurons and their role
in social cognition, mimetic behaviours and also anti-coordination. Mirror neurons (MNs) are
so called because the same set of neurons are found to fire when both the individual
physically executes an activity and also when observing another doing so. Vittorio Gallese
espouses the view that the MNs conduct an ‘offline’ simulation when observing another and
this leads to the necessary social inference by relying on the first person experience or
capabilities for the same. Thus, as action prediction or mind reading of the other emanates in
a self-referential way as the inferences for the other rely on the neural reuse of self-generated
activities, Gallese calls this Embodied Simulation Theory. Scott Kelso recounted important
experiments done by his group which show that anti-coordination in a social setting is part of
the mirror neuron system and it is ‘costly’ as it entails executing what is contrary to the
predicted action. Sheri Markose noted that this corresponds to what has been recently
suggested by economists Michèle Belot and Vince Crawford2 (jointly with the cognitive
neuroscientist Cecilia Hayes) that the role of mirror neurons in coordinating and
synchronizing actions is great despite strategic incentives not to coordinate. This evidence
from recent discoveries in neuro-science indicates that herding and group think which can
entrain systems is a dominant factor. While neuro-markers for contrarian and heterogeneous
social behaviours have also been identified, Rahul Savani, who is both a computer scientist
and game theorist, said that much more experimental research is needed to investigate the
link between neuro-markers associated with social cognition and the phenomena of social
dynamics such as in herding and also anti-coordinated behaviours. The latter can work to
equilibrate systems (an example of this is the archetype of the contrarian trader in mitigating
asset bubbles) and they can be disruptive when they show up as structure changing
innovations.
Sheri Markose in her talk said that Robert Lucas had seminally referred to the role of the
strategic use of ‘surprises’ or innovations. Both she and Rahul Savani noted that as this is not
considered by game theorists as a possibility within a Nash equilibrium, this area requires
renewed research, especially in the context of how macro-economic models and macroprudential policy can cope with fast moving complex adaptive economic systems.3 Markose
added that extant macroeconomics and policy design, in having eschewed a complexity
perspective on the arms races in strategic innovation, has paid a heavy price in being unable
to respond to innovations in the monetary and financial environments by treating them as
exogenous shocks. Markose combined the recent evidence discussed by Vittorio Gallese and
Scott Kelso on the role of the mirror neuron system in providing an offline simulation
platform for purposes of social cognition and interaction with the only known logic of Gödel
incompleteness which involves simulation. The latter produces a phenotype for diversity in
2
Players of Matching Pennies automatically imitate opponents’ gestures against strong incentives, (2012) Michèle
Belot, Vincent P. Crawford and Cecilia Heyes , http://www.pnas.org/content/110/8/2763.abstract .
3
With regard to the transformation of the monetary and financial environment which macro-economists and regulators failed
to take on board in the pre-2007 crisis environment, one of the more prescient of macro-economists, William White, has
recently stated “it seems to me that that nobody on the regulatory side has really got to grips with the reality of this constant
innovation” (Financial Times, June 25 2014).
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the form of ‘innovations’ as exit points from listable sets of given actions. A necessary
condition for this requires mutually mentalizing agents with similar capabilities being
adduced to the mirror neurons system for offline simulations, especially those involving anticoordination and surprises, viz. positions that are contrary to predicted actions. In Gödel
logic, the contrarian is equated with the Liar and the non-computability, undecidability and
incompleteness that follow are analogous to what has been highlighted by Brian Arthur, one
of the pioneers of artificial stock market models, to be a feature of many market games which
have a contrarian or minority payoff structure.4
The session on Models of Radical Uncertainty and Inductive Decision Making brought
together four scientists, Itzhak Gilboa, Eshel Ben-Jacob, David Tuckett and Michelle
Baddeley who are, respectively, on the forefront of decision theory, complexity sciences,
behavioural psychology and behavioural economics. Their talks aimed to throw light on how
effective decision making is and ought to be done in complex environments in which
alternatives for choice may not be enumerable with alternatives arising outside of given
listable sets for which probabilistic calculations cannot be made. The prominent physicist and
complexity theorist, Eshel Ben-Jacob, spoke on the social intelligence and collective decision
making of bacteria and how this can give ideas for solving collective commons problems.
Gilboa offers a non-Bayesian decision theory framework for beliefs that cannot be quantified
by a Bayesian prior. Tuckett brings in the notion of ontological uncertainty where the
structure of the decision maker’s environment does not give any clue to the mapping between
actions and outcomes, with many of the future consequences being unknown and
unknowable. Both Gilboa and Tuckett give applications of their proposed models for macroeconomics policy. Tuckett et.al. propose to use Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT)
supported by Directed Algorithmic Text Analysis (DATA) on ‘big data’ to extract reliable
indicators for policy makers about the state of the economy. He demonstrates how this
method can offer value in the policy areas of financial stability as well as monetary and fiscal
policy. Michelle Baddeley urges the need to ‘rethink’ the mainstream view on rationality and
recommends a non-dichotomous view of human behaviour. Baddeley said that it should no
longer be the case that observed behaviours driven by ‘animal spirits’ associated with
emotions such as optimism and pessimism are considered to be deviations from rationality
and hence treated as irrational and sub-optimal.
2.4 Panel Discussions
In response to concerns of students and the media on the lack of diversity in the economics
curricula the conference held a panel discussion: Why do we need diversity in
macroeconomics? How do we build capacity in new approaches?
This session was open to the general public. Two student representatives from the Post-Crash
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In a game with a contrarian or minority payoff structure, players have to anti-herd to win. In a stock market game,
investors have to buy when majority is selling and sell when the majority is buying. Brian Arthur
(http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~wbarthur/Papers/El_Farol.pdf) argues that this will make it logically impossible to have
homogenous rational expectations as adherence to any common meta model for prediction will be self-defeating and
irrational in order to win the game. Heterogeneity will become endemic to the system and the archetype of the contrarian is
essential to mitigate trend following and unstable one way markets.
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Economics Societies of Cambridge University and Essex University contributed to this panel
and expressed their dissatisfaction on the lack of relevance of much of the economics
curricula to events associated with the 2007 economic crisis. Eric Beinhocker gave the
rationale behind INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking) and the new initiatives in
putting together a more diverse economic curriculum. Marcus Miller elaborated on the
different fauna among economists which he dubbed ‘foxes and hedgehogs’. The latter, with
their single-minded refinements of rationality and equilibrium appear to have edged out all
other perspectives. Michelle Baddeley gave examples from behavioural and experimental
economics that can enrich macro-economics.
The final panel discussion on What do Policymakers Need from Macroeconomics, and
What Needs to Change to get it? aimed to bridge what many at the conference regarded as a
wide gap between policy and academic macroeconomics. Small analytical ‘toy’ models that
are favoured by mainstream publications have little relevance for real world problems and
there appears to be a lack of incentive to develop the skill sets for granular large scale data
driven models, to acquire detailed knowledge of a fast moving monetary and financial
environments or simply to challenge orthodoxy. The pressure to publish in ‘highly rated’
mainstream journals for economists, especially for UK economists evaluated under the REF
(Research Excellence Framework), militates against attempts to break away from the
mainstream and to adopt multi-disciplinary approaches. Laura Kodres highlighted the fact
that recent attempts to make good the problems of macro-economics by appending what are
typically referred to as ‘financial or monetary frictions’ into an otherwise stable macroeconomic model, as if they are incidental rather than integral to the economy, does disservice
to the field. Luiz de Mello spoke about the new developments at the OECD under the rubric
New Approaches to Economic Challenges (http://www.oecd.org/naec/workshop.htm).
Initiatives like NAEC aim to bring in diversity in economic modelling through exposure and
training of OECD economists to new approaches which include those investigated at this
ESRC conference.
2.5 Concluding Remarks
This conference and report highlighted some of the new approaches in macroeconomics that
might complement the currently dominant paradign and address some of the limitations
associated with it. As at the 2012 ESRC and the Oxford Martin School International
Scientific Symposium on Macroeconomics, this conference underscored the need for ESRC
and other funding bodies to support and galvanize academic economists to pursue greater
diversity in their research methods. Extant macro-economic models have had to resort to
extreme reductionism to obtain tractable results, while econometric models have to rely on
long time series and find it difficult to track structural changes. ACE models, on the other
hand, can build large-scale macro-economic models based on ‘big data’ at any level of
granularity and also allow for interconnectedness of economic participants operating within
institutional constraints and incentives. Different behavioural assumptions can be made for
agents’ action choices. The macro-scopic dynamics emerging from such specifications
behind computational simulation can give economic researchers a powerful new tool for
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inference. New developments in neuro-science based on the role of mirror neurons for social
cognition can do away with many ‘just so’ stories on social coordination, anti-coordination
and strategic innovation. This conference has highlighted the need for more neurophysiological experiments to determine the basis of deception, surprise and innovation in
social interaction. In the absence of such foundational studies, the current situation of
ignoring novelty production as a ubiquitous aspect of strategic behaviour will continue. As
innovations bring about endogenous structural changes and radical uncertainty, both being
the hallmarks of complex adaptive systems, a lack of a complexity perspective in macroeconomics will result in the continued adherence to neo-classical rationality which confines
choice to a given list of action choices and provides no means to exit such sets and produce
the observed phenotype for diversity.
More details on the papers given and discussions can be found at the conference website
which has been updated with slides and videos of talks by those who have given permission
for this.
http://webwip.essex.ac.uk/economics/news_and_seminars/ESRC.aspx
2.6 Follow Ups
●In the aftermath of the ESRC Diversity in Macroeconomics conference, Luiz De Mello
from the OECD was instrumental in inviting Doyne Farmer and Sheri Markose to speak at
the 'Workshop on New Tools and Methods for Policy-making' at the OECD headquarters in
Paris on Monday 19 May 2014. This was co-organised by the United Nations Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the OECD initiative on New
Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC).
● In March 2014, Eric Beinhocker and Sheri Markose were invited to the London School of
Economics ESRC Systemic Risk Centre to talk on agent based financial network models to
determine instabilities of the system and to guide it toward more sustainable
http://www.systemicrisk.ac.uk/events/towards-sustainable-financial-system
●James Richardson of the HM Treasury who was a speaker at the conference has organized a
mini-conference on agent-based models as part of the 50th anniversary events for the UK
Government Economic Service. Paul de Grauwe, Doyne Farmer and Sheri Markose have
been invited to speak at this conference.
●A research proposal based on a consortium of speakers and themes of this conference is
being developed for funding from the ESRC.
Report prepared by Sheri Markose (Final Version, September 2014)
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Appendix 1: Conference Program
24 February 2014: 9.15 am - 9.40 am Coffee and Registration
9.40-10 am Welcome and Introduction
10 am -11.30 am: Chair Marcus Miller
Session 1:Developing Macroeconomics and Macro-Prudential Policy That is fit for
Purpose
-Macro-Prudential Policy: How to Design for Success, Charles Goodhart
(London School of Economics)
-Forecasting and Monetary Policy Making, Neil Ericsson (Federal Reserve Board of
Governors)
-OTC Derivatives Reforms: Considerations and Challenges, Mark Manning (Reserve Bank
of Australia)
Discussant Jagjit Chadha (University of Kent)
11.30 am – 11.45 am Coffee
11.45 am -1.15 am Chair: Sujit Kapadia (Bank of England)
Session 2: New Macroeconomic Models and Management of Extreme Dynamics
-Behavioural Macroeconomics, Paul de Grauwe (London School of Economics)
- Leverage in Financial Markets: An ACE model of Portfolio Choice and Trading, Klaus
Reiner Schenk-Hoppé (University of Leeds and NHH - Norwegian School of Economics)
-Agent-based Models for Systemic Risk - Doyne Farmer (Oxford University)
Discussant Alistair Milne (Loughborough University)
Lunch 1.15 – 2.15pm
2.15pm -3.45 pm: Chair: Guilia Iori (City University)
Session 3 Dealing with Complexity and Uncertainty in Macro Dynamics
- Endogenous Macro Dynamics from Large Numbers of Simple Agents, Robert Axtel
(Visiting Oxford University, George Mason University)
-Taking Uncertainty Seriously: Simplicity versus Complexity in Financial Regulation, Sujit
Kapadia (Bank of England) and Gerd Gigerenzer (Max Planck Institute)
- Modern Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Hedgehog or Fox? Marcus Miller (Warwick
University)
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Discussant: Marco Raberto (University of Genoa)
3.45pm –4 pm Coffee
4 pm – 5.30 pm: Chair: Marco Francesconi (Essex University)
Session 4: Economic Growth After Liquidity Trap and Bubble Economy: How To
Rebalance the Economy?
-Credit for Growth and Credit for Bubbles, Richard Werner (University of Southampton)
-Can Distributed ICT-based Peer-Peer Lending Overcome Pro-cyclicality of Fractional
Banking and Get Money to SMEs?, David Hales (Open University and University of Szeged,
Hungary)
-Fiscal Policy After the 2007 Crisis, James Richardson (Her Majesty’s Treasury)
Discussant: Oliver Burrows (Bank of England)
6.10pm-7.40 pm Ivor Crewe Auditorium
Why Do We Need Diversity in Macroeconomics? How to Increase Capacity in New
Approaches?
Chair: Sheri Markose (University of Essex)
Panellists :Mark Buchanan (Science Writer), Eric Beinhocker (Oxford, INET),
Michel Ghassibe (President, Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism), Adrià Porta
Caballé (Post Crisis Economics Society, University of Essex), Marcus Miller (Cambridge
University), Michelle Baddeley (University College London)
Conference Drinks 7.40pm - 8 pm Foyer of Ivor Crewe Hall
8pm Conference Dinner Wivenhoe House Hotel
25 February 2014
9.30 am -11 am Chair: Robert Axtell (George Mason University, Oxford, Visiting INET)
Session 5: New Foundations for Social Cognition and Strategic Interaction:
Coordination, Anti-Coordination and Innovation
- Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory of Social Cognition, Vittorio Gallese (University
of Parma)
-Neuromarkers for Social Coordination: A Dynamical Approach, Scott Kelso (Florida
Atlantic University and University of Ulster)
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- Mirroring and the Liar Qua Rule-breaker: Complex Strategic Behaviour and Arms Race in
Novelty and Surprises, Sheri Markose (University of Essex)
Discussant Rahul Savani (University of Liverpool)
11am – 11.15am Coffee
11.15 am – 1pm Chair: Doyne Farmer (INET)
Session 6: Models of Radical Uncertainty and Inductive Decision Making
-Social Intelligence and Collective Decisions, Eshel Ben-Jacob (Tel Aviv University and
Sagol School of Neuroscience)
- Beliefs and non-Bayesian Modes of Reasoning: With Some Reflections for Policy Making,
Ithzak Gilboa (Tel-Aviv University and HEC, Paris)
- Macroeconomics with Human Sentient and Social Actors, David Tuckett (University
College London)
Discussant Michelle Baddeley(University College London)
Lunch 1pm- 2pm
2pm–3.30 pm: Chair: Roland Meeks (University of Essex)
Session 7:On Holistic Systemic Risk Approach: Statistical and Structural Macro-nets
- Measuring Contagion Potential among Sovereigns and Banks Using a Mixed-cross-section
GVAR, Marco Gross and Christoffer Kok (European Central Bank)
-Network Risk and Key Players: Structural Analysis of Interbank Liquidity
Kathy Yuan (London School of Economics, ESRC Systemic Risk Centre) and Edward
Denbee (Bank of England)
-Multi-Agent Financial Network Models for Systemic Risk Monitoring and Design of Pigou
Tax for SIFIs (Acefinmod Group, Essex) Simone Giansante (University of Bath) and Sheri
Markose (University of Essex)
Discussant: Tomohiro Ota (Bank of England)
3.30-3.45 Coffee Break
3.45- 5pm: Chair Jagjit Chadha (University of Kent)
Panel Discussion:What do Policymakers Need from Macroeconomics, and What Needs
to Change to get it?
David Miles (Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England, Imperial College), Neil
Ericsson (Federal Reserve Board of Governors), Luiz de Mello (OECD)
Close of Conference