11-17

A Market Simulation with Aglets

The behavior of the real market is quite complicated and the analysis is very difficult. The computer simulation of the market provide us with powerful tools to understand the essential elements for a certain phenomenon of the market like bubbles. Recently, Steiglitz and Shapiro [1] constructed a market model including production and consumption and verified the occurrence of bubbles and negative bubbles.

Now we have implemented the simulation using the Aglets [TM] technology [2]. Aglets are Java [TM] objects that can move from one host on the network to another and can communicate with other aglets by message passing. By using aglets, we can construct a market dynamically. That is, we can add or delete agents which participate in a market at any time and can watch the market status by sending various kinds of observer aglets.

In this talk, I will present a demonstration of the simulation using aglets and discuss the results of it.

References

[1] Simulating the Madness of Crowds: Price Bubbles in an Auction-Mediated Robot Market, K. Steiglitz and D. Shapiro, Computational Economics, vol. 12, pp. 35-59, 1998. (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/madness.ps)

[2] Aglets Software Development Kit, http://www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets/