New Trends In Dynamic Systems Theory And Economics

New Trends in Dynamic System Theory and Economics contains selected papers presented at a two-week seminar on New Trends in Dynamic System Theory and Economics held at the International Center for Mechanical Sciences in Udine, Italy, on September 12-23, 1977. Contributors discuss recent trends in the application of dynamic system theory in economic analysis, paying particular attention to information patterns and uncertainty, optimal control theory and its application, and disequilibrium analysis. This book is divided into three sections and consists of 20 chapters. Decision problems of agents with different or imperfect information or under uncertainty are first discussed. This section gives a detailed analysis of the properties of Nash and Stackelberg equilibria in dynamic games under several different information patterns. Consideration is also given to microdecision problems of individual agents, macroeconomic stabilization of an uncertain dynamic economy, and the uncertainty of parameter values. The chapters that follow focus on recent advances in optimal control theory and application of control theory. Disequilibrium analysis of a macroeconomic model is presented, along with the dynamics of disequilibria of a macroeconomic model with flexible wages and prices. A generalization of Pareto optimality is used to discuss the connection between the optimality and stability problems in a general setting. The last three chapters explore ""modern"" approaches to tâtonnement processes. This book will be of interest to students and practitioners of applied mathematics and econometrics.

Originally published in 1985. Mathematical methods and models to facilitate the understanding of the processes of economic dynamics and prediction were refined considerably over the period before this book was written. The field had grown; and many of the techniques involved became extremely complicated. Areas of particular interest include optimal control, non-linear models, game-theoretic approaches, demand analysis and time-series forecasting. This book presents a critical appraisal of developments and identifies potentially productive new directions for research. It synthesises work from mathematics, statistics and economics and includes a thorough analysis of the relationship between system understanding and predictability.

Giovanni Castellani Rector of the University of Venice This book contains the Proceedings of the Conference on "Economic Policy and Control Theory" which was held at the University of Venice (Italy) on 27 January-l February 1985. The goal of the Conference was to survey the main developments of control theory in economics, by emphasizing particularly new achievements in the analysis of dynamic economic models by con trol methods. The development of control theory is strictly related to the development of science and technology in the last forty years. Control theory was indeed applied mainly in engineering, and only in the sixties economists started using control methods for analys ing economic problems, even if some preliminary economic applica tions of calculus of variations, from which control theory was then developed, date back to the twenties. Applications of control theory in economics also had to solve new, complicated, problems, like those encountered in optimal growth models, or like the determination of the appropriate inter temporal social welfare function, of the policy horizon and the relative final state of the system, of the appropriate discount factor. Furthermore, the uncertainty characterizing economic models had to be taken into account, thus giving rise to the development of stochastic control theory in economics.

Usually, the first edition of a book still contains a multiplicity of typographic, con ceptional, and computational errors even if one believes the opposite at the time of publication. As this book did not represent a counterexample to this rule, the current second edition offers a chance to remove at least the known shortcomings. The book has been partly re-organized. The previously rather long Chapter 4 has been split into two separate chapters dealing with discrete-time and continuous time approaches to nonlinear economic dynamics. The short summary of basic properties of linear dynamical systems has been banned to an appendix because the line of thought in the chapter seems to have been unnecessarily interrupted by these technical details and because the book concentrates on nonlinear systems. This appendix, which mainly deals with special formal properties of dynamical sys tems, also contains some new material on invariant subspaces and center-manifold reductions. A brief introduction into the theory of lags and operators is followed by a few remarks on the relation between the 'true' properties of dynamical systems and their behavior observable in numerical experiments. Additional changes in the main part of the book include a re-consideration of Popper's determinism vs. inde terminism discussion in the light of chaotic properties of deterministic, nonlinear systems in Chapter 1. An investigation of a simultaneous price-quantity adjustment process, a more detailed inquiry into the uniqueness property of limit cycles, and a short presentation of relaxation oscillations are included in Chapter 2.