Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution is a significant contribution to the new paradigm straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management, which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary systems and must therefore be analyzed with evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems also display complicated behaviors that are, to a significant degree, generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. The papers in this volume consider a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behavior of single markets at the other. The authors consider commerce from a variety of perspectives, ranging from marketing to macroeconomics. The papers are united by methodologies that, at their core, are evolutionary, although the techniques cover a wide range, from philosophical discourse to differential equations, genetic algorithms, multiagent simulations, and cellular automata. Some of the many issues considered include the dynamics of debt deflation, stock management in a complex environment, interactions among consumers and their effect on market behavior, and nonlinear methods to profit from financial market volatility. Because intellectual analysis is itself an evolutionary process, several of the papers critically analyze this newly emerging approach to understanding humankind's most complex invention, its social system.

The papers are a refereed, revised, and updated subset of those first presented to the twelfth conference in the series International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. The conference was held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in 1996, and attracted participants from Australia, Japan, Europe, and the United States.

This volume is the twelfth in a series, called International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. The proceedings series is under the general editorship of William Barnett. Individual volumes in the series generally have coeditors, who differ for each volume, as the topics of the conferences change each year. The co-organizers of the twelfth symposium, which produced the current proceedings volume, were Carl Chiarella, Steve Keen, Bob Marks, and Hermann Schnabl. The coeditors of this proceedings volume are William Barnett, Carl Chiarella, Steve Keen, Bob Marks, and Hermann Schnabl.

The topic of the conference and focus of this book is “Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution: Complexity and Evolutionary Analysis in Economics, Finance, Marketing, and Management.” The volume showcases the many facets of the new evolutionary approach to analyzing and modeling commercial systems. The collection is distinguished by the wide range of methodologies presented, ranging from philosophical discourse at one extreme to multiagent modeling at the other. The volume is a significant contribution to the new paradigm acknowledging that commercial systems are evolutionary systems and must therefore be analyzed by use of evolutionary tools. This new paradigm straddles economics, finance, marketing, and management.

The conference that produced this volume was held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in 1996, and attracted participants from Australia, Japan, Europe, and the United States. The conference was sponsored by the Faculty of Commerce at the University of New South Wales. Many of the prior volumes in this series were sponsored by the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and some have been cosponsored by the RGK Foundation.