Robert Axtell

Rob is Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., an independent public policy research organization. His expertise includes economic geography, environmental policy, industrial organization, discount policy, behavioral economics, and global change science. He specializes in building so-called agent-based computational models in which each individual who participates in a social process is represented. His 1996 book with J. Epstein, "Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up," (MIT Press), introduced this modeling approach to a wide audience.

His current research includes studies of firms (e.g., firm size, growth rate distributions), models of firm behavior in the presence of regulation (with C. Andrews), and a model of the adoption of smoking among adolescents (with Brookings colleagues). A forthcoming book entitled "Artificial Economies of Adaptive Agents" applies these agent modeling techniques to questions in economics (e.g., markets, the theory of the firm, macroeconomics). He has also applied agent computing tools to problems of anthropology and archaeology, in the ‘artificial Anasazi' project, working closely with Southwestern anthropologists from the University of Arizona. Rob is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute where he is an External Faculty Member.