Modelling the Economy as an Agent-Based Process: ABCE, A Modelling Platform and Formal Language for ACE

Authored by Davoud Taghawi-Nejad

Date Published: 2013-06

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: ABCE (Python Agent-Based Complete Economy Platform)

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Pseudocode

Model Code URLs: https://github.com/DavoudTaghawiNejad/abce

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the key innovation of Agent-Based Economics is not the introduction of the individual agent as an ontological object, but the fact that the economy is modelled as a process. I propose a formal language to express economic models as processes. This formal language leads to ABCE, a modelling platform for Agent-Based Economic models. ABCE's core idea is that the modeller specifies the decisions of the agents, the order of actions, the goods and their physical transformation (the production and the consumption functions). Actions, such as production and consumption, interactions and exchange, are handled automatically by the modelling platform, when the agent decided to do them. The result is a program where *the source code contains only economically meaningful commands*. Beyond the decisions and the setup, ABCE handles everything in the background. It scales on multi-core computers and cloud computing services, without the intervention of the modeler. ABCE is based on python, a language which is characterized by highly readable code.

Tags

Agent Based Modeling Economics Macoeconomics Ontology Platform Process