Rob Axtell is a research associate at the Brookings Institution (Washington, D.C.) and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1992), where he studied economics, computer science and public policy.
Axtell is the author of research papers on mathematical modeling (theory of model aggregation), computing (symbolic computation, simulation methodology, artificial life), environmental policy (markets for pollution permits) and economics (discounting behavior, performance of decentralized markets).
His current research focuses on modeling social systems using populations of artificial adaptive agents. Accounts of this research have recently appeared in Scientific American, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute. He is the co-author, with Joshua Epstein, of Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom-Up, just published by Brookings in paper and on CD-ROM. He is currently involved in a project, undertaken with Southwestern archeologists, to develop an agent-based simulation of the migration of the Anasazi in Long House Valley (c. 400-1400 A.D.) He has also been using agents to study questions of economic equity, the emergence of firms, and spatial processes in evolutionary game theory.
He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and daughter.
Rob Axtell's home page at the Brookings Institution.
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