The visible hand Book

With the help of the method of synergetics this study shows a consistent formal derivation of the dynamics of a macroeconomic system as the effect ofthe decision behavior of the microeconomic agents. A special issue is the economic interpretation of the synergetic modelling of the microlevel and its relation to other economic research on microfoundations of the macroeconomics, i. e. the New Classical and the New Keynesian approach. The transformation of a well-known macroeconomicbusiness cycle model into a micro-based synergetic model gives an illustrative example how the method can be applied to economic problems. It can be shown that the transformed model generates new interesting features like inherent and assymetric cycles, a high stability to exogenous shocks and even a so called
"deterministic chaos". Beside these new featuresthe main structure of the basic model in terms of the causality of the relevant parameters remains unchanged. Thus, the investigation gives the researcher an example of a method that makes it possible to "test" the macroeconomic effects of different behavior assumptions of the economic agents on the macrolevel in a dynamic context. The work ends with an attempt of an interpretation of macroeconomic data of the FRG in the last thirty years in the way that it is traced back to changes in the behavior of the economic agents.