An Extensible and Scalable Agent-Based Simulation of Barter Economics

Abstract

This thesis project studies a simulation of decentralised bilateral exchange economics, in which prices are private information and trading decisions are left to individual agents. We set to re-engineer the model devised by Herbert Gintis and take his Delphi version as the basis for providing a new, portable barter economics simulation tool in Java. By introducing some extension points for new agent and market behaviours, we provide simple means to implement variations on the original model. In particular, our system could be used to study the emergent properties of heterogeneous agent behaviours. Through the addition of some default visualisation models we provide means for an improved intuitive understanding of the interaction between individual agents. The multi-agent simulation library MASON is used as the underlying simulation platform. The results of running the software with various parameters are compared to the results from the original version to confirm the convergence of the two programs.