Giacomo Gallegati

Giacomo Gallegati is a Ph.D. candidate from Collegio Carlo Alberto / University of Turin, in cotutelle with the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Recently, he is got interested with topics of political economy, in particular media economics and political polarization. Currently, he is organizing a Ph.D. conference on those topics at University Paris1.

The project

Title: Did the media get polarized ?

Agent-based modeling (ABM) constitutes a new-born approach for macroeconomic modeling. Agent-based computational economics uses computer simulation to build models with heterogeneous agents, based on simple behavioral rules and on the interaction between these agents, where the resulting aggregate dynamics and empirical regularities are not known a priori and are not deducible from individual behavior. ABM typically possess the following structure. There is a population – or a set of populations – of agents (e.g., consumers, households, firms, government, financial institutions, etc.). Once the “taxonomy of agents” (LeBaron and Tesfatsion, 2008) is decided upon, the agents are then given a set of characteristics appropriate for the model at hand (e.g., endowments of commodities, income distribution, technology, etc.). Next, the agents must also be given simple behavioral rules through which they interact. Agents are then allowed to have local interaction and to change their individual rules (through adaptation) as well as the network which governs their interaction. By aggregating, some statistical regularity emerges, which cannot be inferred from individual behavior (self-emerging regularities). This bottom-up emergent behavior allows researchers to understand why certain macro-level regularities emerge and persist in decentralized market economies, despite the absence of any forms of top-down centralized coordination.

Hosting institution: University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne