ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a well-established model from economics that, even in its simplest form, raises some of the central quandaries of the global economy. It identifies several ways of modifying the model that would allow comparisons between the standard equilibrium solutions and solutions that would arise if adaptive rule-based agents were to replace the agents with foresight. Though the rubric "webs" was used to distinguish this subgroup from the others, the subgroup also devoted substantial time to questions of adaptation and evolution in economics. The analogies with well-established biological concepts and interactions are quite appealing, but there is much work to be done in recasting these models in ways that are both precise and in contact with economic theory. There are also some possibilities of using a canonical representation of nonlinear utility functions to discuss the expected evolution of the web in terms of new combinations of building blocks.
