The inaugural lecture of Prof Antoine Godin: 'Understanding transitions from the bottom up: a modelling approach'

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Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Venue: Room 0002, John Galsworthy Building, Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free

Transitions are intrinsic to economics: innovation and technological change re-shape the structure of the economy, both on the financial and on the productive side; legislations create and destroy markets; consumer behaviors and preferences generate obsolescence. These transition processes may be small and contained within a sector (i.e. a process innovation) or a large and have global impacts (i.e. the IT revolution). Understanding the pervasive ramifications of a transition is thus fundamental to understand the dynamics at the hart of the economic evolution.

Any transition process can be described in terms of origin, speed, diffusion, penetration and end-point. To understand the consequence of a transition, it is necessary to observe all these aspects. More precisely, you need an approach presenting the following characteristics: path-dependency, heterogeneous agents, out-of equilibrium dynamics, and asynchronous decisions. The modeling approach described here present some or all of these characteristics, allowing thus for a pervasive analysis of transition dynamics.

In recent years the combination of the so-called Agent-Based (AB) and Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) approaches has been gaining more and more support. AB models conceive the economic system as complex adaptive systems whose properties emerge from the interaction of multiple heterogeneous agents. The SFC approach provides a flexible, general, and coherent modelling tool that explicitly models the various interdependencies between flows and stocks on the one hand, and real and nominal variable on the other, using a rigorous accounting framework.

By combining the AB and SFC approaches, we are fundamentally adding a new layer of complexity. In addition to agents' interactions in shaping individual and aggregate behaviors, we can now model the fact that, in a monetary economy, agents are closely interrelated through a network of interacting balance sheets. Decisions undertaken by individual agents result in variations to their balance sheet, which also affects the balance sheets of other agents, both directly and indirectly. Tracking these relationships is absolutely crucial in order to understand the functioning of our highly financialized economies.

Followed by a drinks reception.

For further information about this event:

Contact: Lucy Williams, Events Officer, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Email: l.williams@kingston.ac.uk