Editorial to the special issue on ZIMI

This issue of the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination is devoted to papers focussing on the Emergence of Macro Phenomena from Interactions among Zero-or Minimal-Intelligence Agents (ZIMI agents).The preparation of this special issue was motivated by the first and second online conferences on ZIMI agents that were hosted at Yale University in 2020 and 2021.Over the past three decades, exploration of socio-economic, engineering, computational and financial systems using the zero-intelligence agents approach has seeped into many disciplines and generated much interdisciplinary research with new ideas, concepts, and tools.Using such minimalist approaches to modelling the interactions of micro-level units in order to identify and understand the emergent properties of aggregate level systems appeals to a wide range of scholars from philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, computer science, and various fields of business management such as finance and accounting.The present collection of papers on ZIMI agents exemplifies this broad range of applications.The first paper by Paul Brewer, Jeremy Jaybar and Raymond Moberly compares the performance of ZIMI agents in various voting experiments, finding that zero intelligence can sometimes lead to better outcomes albeit with a slower rate of convergence.In the next paper, Dave Cliff introduces a new type of zero intelligence traders, denoted as Parameterized-Response Zero Intelligence traders, which allows for the specification of a strategy of each trader via shifts of the probability mass of its quote prices.The dynamics of a market with such traders shows long periods of stable behaviour with intermittent changes between steady states.