The use of context can considerably facilitate reasoning by restricting the beliefs reasoned upon to those relevant and providing extra information specific to the context. Despite the use and formalization of context being extensively studied both in AI and ML, context has not been much...

I analyse complexity from a philosophical point of view and distinguish three different kinds of complexity relevant to the modelling of economic agents: environmental complexity, the complexity of an agent's models and the behavioural complexity. The move to considering situations of greater...

I argue that the characterization of reducibility as computability is too weak to be credible. I propose an improved version -- "intentional computability" -- and show that it is indeed a stronger criteria, in that there may be specifications for which there exist programs but where there is no...

There is a certain style of paper which has become traditional in MAS - one where a formal logic is introduced to express some ideas, or where a logic is extended on the basis that it then covers certain particular cases, but where the logic is not actually used to make any substantial...

Endowing agents with "social rationality" [10, 12, 11] can aid overall efficiency in tasks where cooperation is beneficial to system level performance. However it is difficult to maintain this beneficial effect in open and unpredictable systems. Such systems seem to require a "bespoke" design...

In many markets, customer preferences depend on the activity of the customer. The authors have previously demonstrated a model that allows the testing of the qualitative judgments of domain experts in spirits markets against relevant EPOS price and sales data. This paper extends the use of...

We consider here issues of open access to social simulations, with a particular focus on software licences, though also briefly discussing documentation and archiving. Without any specific software licence, the default arrangements are stipulated by the Berne Convention (for those countries...

A published simulation model (Riolo et al. 2001) was replicated in two independent implementations so that the results as well as the conceptual design align. This double replication allowed the original to be analysed and critiqued with confidence. In this case, the replication revealed some...

Brian Arthur's `El Farol Bar' model is extended so that the agents also learn and communicate. The learning and communication is implemented using an evolutionary process acting upon a population of mental models inside each agent. The evolutionary process is based on a Genetic Programming...

It is argued that, due to the complexity of most economic phenomena, the chances of deriving correct models from a priori principles are very small. Instead, a more descriptive approach to modelling should be pursued. Agent-based modelling is characterised as a step in this direction. However...