Self-organization

This chapter focuses on self-organization, which explains the formation of structure without external control. Self-organization is found in physical, chemical, and biological systems. Examples from these disciplines are used to show that self-organization of agents does not require cognition or purposeful behavior. Self-organization is also found in social systems, but with the complication that it interacts with human-designed organization. Several examples of small-scale self-organization in social systems are presented before discussing large-scale self-organization. Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order is introduced and compared with the complexity concept of self-organization. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the concept of dissipative systems and dissipative structure, which originated in chemistry but is highly relevant to economics. In terms of methods, the chapter introduces cellular automata and agent-based models as highly relevant tools for complexity economics.