Artificial worlds and economics,part I

In this and a companion paper (Lane 1993), I describe a class of models, called artificial worlds (AWs), that are designed to give insight into a process called emergent hierarchical organization (EHO). This paper introduces the ideas of EHO and AWs and discusses some of the interferential problems involved in trying to learn about EHO by constructing and studying the properties of AWs. It concludes by introducing two abstract AWs that address important general problems in EHO: the relation between structure and function, and the dynamics of evolutionary processes. The companion paper will discuss several AWs expressly designed to model particular economic phenomena.