We aim at contributing to the debate on the mechanisms and properties of economic fluctuations. We consider a crucial aspect among many thought to influence this ubiquitous and extremely relevant phenomenon: the interaction structure that characterises the organisation of production, that is,...

Selection procedures for new recruits in research organizations, supposedly aiming at identifying the candidates with the highest potential, relies necessarily on indirect information concerning the quality of a researcher. It is safe to assume that this information is correlated to, but not...

This paper is based on Ille 2013. Both papers analyze the same model, but in contrast, this paper does not provide an analytical solution but rather resorts to simulations. This allows the reader, who is familiar with the former article, to retrace the results more thoroughly and without the...

A major concern about the use of simulation models regards their relationship with the empirical data. The identification of a suitable indicator quantifying the distance between the model and the data would help and guide model selection and output validation. This paper proposes the use of a...

Simulated models suffer intrinsically from validation and comparison problems. The choice of a suitable indicator quantifying the distance between the model and the data is pivotal to model selection. However, how to validate and discriminate between alternative models is still an open problem...

We propose a novel approach to the statistical analysis of simulation models and, especially, agent-based models (ABMs). Our main goal is to provide a fully automated and model-independent tool-kit to inspect simulations and perform counter-factual analysis. Our approach: (i) is easy-to-use by...

Since the influential survey by Windrum et al. (2007), research on empirical validation of agent-based models in economics has made substantial advances, thanks to a constant flow of high-quality contributions. This Chapter attempts to take stock of such recent literature to offer an updated...