http://classic.econmodel.com/terms/agent.htm

Economists like to refer to the people they study as economic agents. Economic agents come in two basic varieties, producers and consumers, and we study their behavior in the Theory of the Firm and the Theory of the Consumer.

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Note added at 41 mins (2009-02-10 14:05:21 GMT)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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[1] or commercial banks.[2]

The term 'agent' is also commonly used in relation to principal-agent models; in this case it refers specifically to the agent who acts on behalf of a principal.[3]

In Agent-Based Computational Economics, the concept of an agent has been more broadly interpreted to be any persistent individual, social, biological, or physical entity interacting with other such entities within the context of a dynamic multi-agent economic system.

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Note added at 42 mins (2009-02-10 14:07:00 GMT)
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http://cepa.newschool.edu/~foleyd/ecagent.pdf

"The Strange History of the Economic Agent"

"The microeconomic approach directly requires a conceptualization of economic agents, the decision makers whose behavior generates data, but the macroeconomic approach equally raises the question of the relation of the behavior of economic agents to aggregate
data."


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Note added at 43 mins (2009-02-10 14:07:37 GMT)
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http://ideas.repec.org/a/cej/primer/v1y2003i1p193-220.html

"The risks of an economic agent: a Rousseauian reading of Adam Smith"


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Note added at 43 mins (2009-02-10 14:07:59 GMT)
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This article is a critical review of Adam Smith’s notion of an economic agent. Using Jean Jacques Rousseau’s arguments, I show the shortcomings of Smith’s hypothesis regarding individuals’ economic behaviour within market society. The morals of sympathy, understood as a social theory and beyond the limitations Smith himself acknowledges, attempts to present the economic agent as a natural and unthreatening figure restricted to market transactions. A careful reading of Rousseau shows the historical character of Smith’s construction, and thereby its failure to recognise the influence of social, cultural and economic development on the formation of this economic agent. Rousseau refuses the possibility of constructing economic theory based on this agent and denounces it as a way of justifying irresponsibility and tyranny. Two possible paths in economics are thus open: economics as an independent field of action or economics as a field regulated by politics

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Note added at 44 mins (2009-02-10 14:08:29 GMT)
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