"[10] The subject has been applied to research areas like asset pricing,[11] energy systems,[12] competition and collaboration,[13] transaction costs,[14] market structure and industrial organization and dynamics,[15] welfare economics,[16] and mechanism design,[17] information and uncertainty,[18] macroeconomics,[19] and Marxist economics.
The ACE modeler provides the initial configuration of a computational economic system comprising multiple interacting agents.
W. Brian Arthur, Eric Baum, William Brock, Cars Hommes, and Blake LeBaron, among others, have developed computational models in which many agents choose from a set of possible forecasting strategies in order to predict stock prices, which affects their asset demands and thus affects stock prices.
These models frequently find that large booms and busts in asset prices may occur as agents switch across forecasting strategies.
[11][27][28] More recently, Brock, Hommes, and Wagener (2009) have used a model of this type to argue that the introduction of new hedging instruments may destabilize the market,[29] and some papers have suggested that ACE might be a useful methodology for understanding the 2008 financial crisis.