The first international workshop on Agent-based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems (AESCS) was initiated as a result ofthe growing recognition of the importance of the computational approaches to study complex economic and social phenomena. The fundamental objective of AESCS 2001 was to foster the formation of an active multi-disciplinary community on multi-agents,computational economics, social dynamics, and complex systems. The aim of AESCS 2001 was also to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, such as computer science, economics, physics, sociology, psychology, and complex theory for understanding emergent phenomena or collective behavior in economic and social systems. We also discussed on effectiveness and limitations of computational models and methods in social sciences. This workshop also intended to increase the awareness of researchers in many fields with sharing the common view that many problems economic and social systems will require collective informationprocessing with a large collection of autonomous and heterogeneous agents.