7. General picture of economic system functioning through information interactions

It was concluded above that institutional frameworks shield the corresponding sub-space from the excessive mutability of the objects in real environment, filter information flows and set the space-forming rules common for all the participants. If the agent activity is localized mainly within the above limitations, he can have a wrong impression that this is the true reality. In principle, the differences between a sub-space and reality (e.g., degree of slow downing the real changes in it) can be noticed and assessed only by an outsider observer (here there are associations with specific features of observer perception of the worlds in the relativism theory from physics).

The sub-spaces created by institutional structures can be ordered according to the multiplicity principle. Multiplicity of sub-spaces is explained by the fact that each new subspace is created as a means of forming the conditions for interactions that are technically impossible in the current sub-space. As mentioned above, there is a "natural" space for agent interaction corresponding to the internal environment of a small group. It would be logical to start from this natural space the examination of the necessity of creating the sub-spaces and their multiplicity. It was previously noted that it could be divided into 3 zones: 1)strong; 2)medium; and 3)weak interactions. The natural space is the first zone (strong interactions).

In the first zone, information exchange intensity for coordination of changes in the state of the participants of joint activity is kept within the current technical limitations on information exchange. Owing to this, agent can maintain the collective model of the environment in the actual state and rehearse possible variants of joint activity. The collective model of environment in this case coincides with the model of each individual participant in the first zone. By definition, group of agents located in the first zone does not need to create additional subspaces to interact between themselves.

Outside of the first zone agents can not build the real time collective model. Collective model of the environment for a certain agents group can form when the agent interaction intensity inside this group is not lower than intensity of the changes in the state of agents themselves. The conditions for existence of the collective model of environment in general looks as follows:

a) Each agent has a certain set of his own information images related with a set of institutional structures. These images have different quality of the picture of agent's capabilities and intentions. The images create a set of channels for agent interactions.

b) The set of private mono-quality information images belonged to the same institutional structure can be transformed into a collective model of the environment for the given group of agents. But only if the possible information exchange intensity between those agents is higher than the intensity of changing by the agents of their information images of the given quality.

In the second zone, technical limitations on information exchange make possible the interactions that are based on mainly unilateral information exchange, and, as a consequence, equal coordination of joint activity is already impossible. In this case, the agents positioned in the second zone relative to the observer receive from him the ready-to-use model of the environment (it could be, for instance, designed by the observer himself or by a group of agents from the first zone). Thus, for some agents the environment model coincides with their individual models (this agents group represents management); for another group their own models are defined by the “directives” and, therefore, correspond to certain fragments of the environment. In such situation, the capabilities of “subordinates” are underused; under certain circumstances, however, this can be compensated by substantial economic benefits owing to higher specialization of the participants of the given joint activity. Interaction participants in the second zone can have significant gains from the joint activity even without the introduction of additional sub-space. However, there is a reserve in their interactions related to the underused capabilities of a portion of participants; this represents a certain incentive for searching for the acceptable compromise between the three components:

1) costs of creation and maintenance of a sub-space that enables equal interactions between all the participants of the joint activity;

2) gains from the equal position of all the participants in the formation of environment model and coordination of their activity;

3) losses related to the inevitable partial inadequacy of the sub-space to the real processes of changes in the economic system.

Under certain conditions (e.g., with specialized education and training of managers, and under weak mutability and “standardization” of capabilities and intentions of the subordinates), a group of managers can create and maintain a model of environment that will be close to the best of the possible variants without introduction of a special sub-space. Thus, incentives of agents from 2^nd zone for creation of new interaction subspaces theoretically exist, but they can happen to be insufficiently strong.

In the third zone, direct information exchange and, consequently, direct coordination of the agent joint activity, are not possible. Stochastic changes in the state of all the objects of economic system devalue information flows by the moment when they reach the border of zone three. Thus, particularly to organize the interaction between the observer and the agents located in zone three, it is necessary to establish a special sub-space. This is an artificial (compare with the "natural" space of interactions) sub-space created by an institutional structure. Functionally it is a projection of real space onto another, less mutable "coordinate axes". Therefore, the above sub-space can be considered as the first level of a hierarchy of the real space projections.

In the general case, it can happen that the first projection does not provide the agents with all the necessary prerequisites for interaction. Suppose that economic system has sufficiently large scale. Then the observer positioned in a certain point of the first sub-space has three zones of interaction (A', B' and C'). Their meaning is identical to the described above zones A, B and C. If the border of the third zone in the first sub-space is distant from the economic system boundaries, the agents have to construct institutional framework in order to create a projection of the second level. It is clear that this situation can be repeated to substantiate the necessity of the third sub-space, and so on.

Thus, the number of sub-spaces required for the agents to organize interactions between themselves within the framework of the entire economic system, depends on the following parameters:

1) the scale and scope of economic system;

2) ICT development level that ensures a certain degree of information exchange;

3) mutability extent of the objects in the system.

Next section - 8. Economy as a complex system of agents with information interactions

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