Visible Hand

With the help of synergetics this study presents a consistent formal derivation of the dynamics of a macroeconomic system as the effect of the decision behaviour of the microeconomic agents. A special issue is the economic interpretation of the synergetic modelling of the microlevel and its relation to other economic research on microfoundations of macoreconomics, for example, the New Classical and the New Keynesian approach. The transformation of a well-known macroeconomic business cycle model into a micro-based synergetic model offers an example of how the method can be applied to economic problems. It can be shown that the transformed model generates new, interesting features such as inherent and asymmetric cycles, a high stability to exogenous shocks and even so-called "deterministic chaos". Beside these new features, the main structure of the basic model in terms of the casuality of the relevant parameters remains unchanged. Thus, the investigation gives the researcher an example of a method that makes it possible to "test" the macoeconomic effects of different behaviour assumptions of the economic agents on the macrolevel in a dynamic context. The work ends with an interpretation of macroeconomic data for Germany in the last 30 years that traces it back to changes in the behaviour of the economic agents.