The role of reinforcement learning in Economics While working on different research projects I got fascinated by RL which got applied to many fields that are focused on agent based modeling. Though it is a field in Machine Learning what interests me is the overlap between that apporach with problems in economics. The latest awesome paper I know is the &quot;AI Economist&quot; by Socher et al.. Do you know more fields/papers where RL is applied to economic decision making? And do you think that this approach can lead to a paradigm shift in economics ?
I would say applications of RL in economics are still in their infancy, though probably have applications in many state-based models, agent-based models, or fields with repeated interactions like game theory.
There has been some work done on what you might call the &quot;microfoundations&quot; part - which is studying &quot;regret&quot;. Susan Athey, for example, does a lot of work in this space, and an example paper is &quot;Policy Learning with Observational Data&quot; found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02896
There are also some papers that shoes RL results converge to what one might obtain via rational expectations / equilibrium. For example, &quot;Learning leads to bounded rationality and the evolution of cognitive bias in public goods games&quot; by Leimar, O. &amp; McNamara, J. M.