Agent (economics)

In economics, an agent is an actor in a model that (generally) solves an optimization problem. In this sense, it is equivalent to the term player, which is also used in economics, but is more common in game theory. For example, buyers and sellers are two commonly-encountered types of agents in partial equilibrium models of a single market. Macroeconomic models, especially dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models that are explicitly based on microfoundations, often distinguish households, firms, and governments or central banks as the main types of agents in the economy. Each of these agents may play multiple roles in the economy; households, for example, might act as consumers, as workers, and as voters in the model. Some macroeconomic models distinguish even more types of agents, such as workers and shoppers or commercial banks.
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