Short Bio: Leigh Tesfatsion

Last Updated: 9 January 2012 Address: Professor of Economics, Mathematics,    and Electrical & Computer Engineering Heady Hall 375 Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011-1070 FAX: (515) 294-0221 http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ tesfatsi AT iastate.edu

Leigh Tesfatsion received the Ph.D. degree in economics, with a minor supporting program in mathematics, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1975. She joined the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California in 1975, where she subsequently was promoted to associate and full professor. In 1990 she accepted a position as Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Mathematics. In January 2009 she accepted an additional courtesy appointment as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE).

Her current research focuses on Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), the computational study of economic processes modeled as dynamic systems of interacting agents. One particular interest is the development of empirically-based ACE test beds for the study of restructured electricity markets, including the AMES Wholesale Power Market Test Bed released as open-source software through the IEEE. Another particular interest is the consideration of optimality and efficiency issues for open-ended dynamic economies (e.g., endogenous worker-employer matching, financial intermediation, and human capital investment). Her past research has included work on learning and decision-making under uncertainty (criterion filtering), adaptive computation techniques for automatic differentiation, homotopy continuation, and nonlinear filtering, multicriteria associative memories, and the development of the Flexible Least Squares (FLS) methodology for model specification and multicriteria estimation that has been incorporated into the statistical packages GAUSS and SHAZAM. This research has been reported in over 100 publications in economics, mathematics, statistics, engineering, and systems science outlets.

She is an Editorial Board member for Edward Elgar's New Dimensions in Networks book series and for the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC) and the Journal of Energy Markets, and is a past associate editor for Applied Mathematics and Computation (1991-2008), the Journal of Public Economic Theory (1997-2006), and the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE-TEC) (1996-2002). She has guest-edited special issues on ACE for the JEDC, Computational Economics, and the IEEE-TEC. From 2002-2004 she was a consultant for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1996-2004 she served as contributing co-editor in charge of the Complexity-at-Large section of the journal Complexity.

She is a co-organizer (with Prof. Dionysios Aliprantis) of an ISU research group focusing on Integrated Retail/Wholesale Power System Operations with Smart-Grid Functionality. She is an active member and panel session organizer for several IEEE techical committees, working groups, and task forces. She has been a Program Committee member and session organizer for many of the annual conferences sponsored by the Society for Computational Economics (SCE), and is the contact liaison for the SCE Special Interest Group on ACE. She has twice served as an elected member of the SCE Advisory Council. She is a participating faculty member in the ISU Graduate Program on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and an Affiliate Faculty Member of the ISU Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery (CCILD).

Since July 1996 she has maintained an ACE website (and news mailing list) that provides pointers to introductory materials, readings, software, teaching resources, and annotated pointers to research groups and individual researchers. The ACE website has been designated as a select learning resource by the Scout Report for Business and Economics (January 29, 1998). She also maintains active resource websites on the Formation of Economic and Social Networks, on General Resources for Macro and Financial Economics, on Electricity Restructuring, and on Open-Source Software for Electricity Market Research, Teaching, and Training.

For further information about her research and professional service activities, please refer to her on-line vita (html).

Ten Selected Publications

• Paul Borrill and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Agent-Based Modeling: The Right Mathematics for the Social Sciences?" (pdf,3.5M), in J. B. Davis and D. W. Hands (eds.), Elgar Recent Economic Modeling Methodology Companion, Edward Elgar Publishers, 2011.

• Hongyan Li and Leigh Tesfatsion, "ISO Net Surplus Collection and Allocation in Wholesale Power Markets Under Locational Marginal Pricing" (pdf,822K), IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 26(2), 2011, 627-641.

• Blake LeBaron and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Modeling Macroeconomies as Open-Ended Dynamic Systems of Interacting Agents" (pdf,45K) American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings) 98(2), 2008, 246-250.

• Leigh Tesfatsion, Agent-Based Computational Economics: A Constructive Approach to Economic Theory (pdf,399K), pp. 831-880 in Leigh Tesfatsion and Kenneth L. Judd (eds.), Handbook of Computational Economics: Volume 2, Agent-Based Computational Economics (Contributors and Contents), Handbooks in Economics Series, Elsevier, North-Holland, 2006.

• Leigh Tesfatsion, "Economic Agents and Markets as Emergent Phenomena" (pdf,167K), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 99(supp. 3), 2002, 7191-7192.

• Leigh Tesfatsion, "Structure, Behavior, and Market Power in an Evolutionary Labor Market with Adaptive Search" (pdf,295K), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 25 (2001), 419-457.

• Mark Pingle and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Active Intermediation in a Monetary Overlapping Generations Economy" (pdf,225K), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 22 (1998), 1533-1574.

• Leigh Tesfatsion, "A Trade Network Game with Endogenous Partner Selection" (pdf,401K), pp. 249-269 in H. M. Amman, B. Rustem, and A. B. Whinston (eds.), Computational Approaches to Economic Problems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.

• Robert E. Kalaba and Leigh Tesfatsion, "A Multicriteria Approach to Model Specification and Estimation" (pdf,1.6M), Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 21 (1996), 193-214 (lead article).

• Robert E. Kalaba and Leigh Tesfatsion, "Nonlocal Automated Sensitivity Analysis" (pdf,1M), Computers and Mathematics with Applications 20(2), 1990, 53-65.