This is the MACRO-MODEL used in:

Charlotte Bruun and Francesco Luna, "Endogenous Growth in a Swarm Economy:
Fighting Time, Space and Complexity" in "Economic Simulations in Swarm:
Agent-Based Modelling and Object Oriented Programming" ed. by Francesco Luna
and Benedict Stefansson, Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000.

When run, the program displays 3 windows:

PRODUCER SPACE is a picture of all the production units of the system. The
color of the unit displays the functional status of the unit:
yellow: Independent production unit
red: Entrepreneur with a firm that is not yet effective
blue: Worker employed by an entrepreneur
green: Entrepreneur with an effective firm (has learned to respond correctly
to demand signals)

GDP is a graph displaying the aggregate level of production measured as the
number of demand signals that producers responded to correctly.

GINI ON WEALTH POSITIONS is the Gini coefficient calculated with respect to
the wealth positions of the agents.


The MODELSWARM PROBE contains the following elements (with initial values
which may be changed by the user):

WorldXSize: 40

WorldYSize: 40

daysInMonth: 20 (changing this means changing the number of signals a
production units receives before it has a chance of updating its neural net
(eg. hire new workers).

failureLine: 1000 (How large a debt can a unit accumulate before it is
declared bankrupt? - the larger the failureLine, the larger the debt that an
agent can accumulate)

mutateMove: 100 (What is the chance of a consumer moving his shoppingcart if
it is placed within an effective firm i.e. if it is placed within a firm
that always responds correctly to his demand signals? - the larger this
number the smaller the chance of such random movement)

mutateFirm: 1000 (What is the chance of an effective firm dissolving for
other reasons than bankruptcy? - the larger the number, the smaller the
chance of such mutation removal of effective firms)

wageOffer: 1 (How large a share of expected profits does an entrepreneur
offer his potential workers when he attempts to hire them? A wageoffer of 1
means an offer of an equal share of expected profits, 0.5 means a share of
only half of the expected profit. Only numbers between 0 and 1 are
meaningful in this context)

ConfidenceThreshold: 0.8 (Potential entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs without
an effective firm needs to monitor their neighbours to see how good they are
at responding to the demand signals of consumers. The production unit builds
up confidence in his various neighbours by adding 0.1 every time he observes
the neighbor responding correctly to demand signals. The confidenceThreshold
determines how much confidence a production unit must have in a neighbour
before he decides to hire that neighbor.)

randomSeed: 1 (Random numbers are used at various points in the program, and
randomseed gives a seed to the random generator).

This code is free software distributed under GPL (see LICENSE file for
details). All code is Copyright (c) Charlotte Bruun and Francesco Luna 2000.



Charlotte Bruun
http://www.socsci.auc.dk/~cbruun/
mail to: cbruun@socsci.auc.dk

Francesco Luna
http://helios.unive.it/~fluna/english/luna.html
fluna@unive.it
