This special issue of the Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control collects a set of papers that were originally presented at the Eighth International Conference of the Society for Computational Economics, held in Aix-en-Provence in June 2002. Shortly after the conference, all authors were invited to submit their work to the JEDC. All submitted manuscripts went through the usual review process and were accepted or rejected based on the reports and recommendations of outside referees. The 13 papers that appear in this special issue give a good overview of the state-of-the-art in computational economics.