Minsim Meeting Agendas and Recaps

09/29/08

For next week:

Look up information on Aspen project/failure(?) (starting point: Aspen)
Look at Chris's software and start trying to see if real-life economic problems are reproduced in the simulation
Examples:
- Tariffs, international trade
- Specialization of labor, Adam Smith
- Maximizing revenue of entrepreneurs vs total country revenue
- Inflation, Stagflation, Phillips curve
- Compare the stability of a central banking system with that of the gold standard
- Evaluate the "bailout"
Post summaries of articles up on the wiki
- Sign up for the wiki
- Edit the section "Papers on economic Agent-Based simulation"

Extension:

Went over code
Why don't prices stabilize on its own?
Broad objectives?
Figure out where supply/demand is in the code
use this to see if the simulation satisfies the properties of supply/demand
Play with parameters- More stability with more workers, etc? (keep in mind that this slows down the program)
Brainstorm things we can look at in the future
Interest rates?
Meet separately Wednesday (4:30, Friend library) to look over code
Start looking into old intro micro/macro books

Tasks

Task

eric- lifecycles of individual
tony- info flow, communication, mkt for information
stephanie- financial intruments? taxes, 401ks?
- Current banking system, politician's plans- will it work? Moratorium on mortgages. Free market vs. regulation of government
- Controversy b/w deregulation and regulation, party platforms
CVS setup

Sheri wants to look at Trend following, arbitrageurs
Tony wants to look at media- flow of information in economy where default state is that they only know local information
To simulate: make a theory, get mathematical results, then simulate to verify/revoke results
Market failure - used to justify infusion of capital, govt regulation (build model for credit default swaps - miscalculation of risk- because of lack of government regulation?)
IIASA: publications that conduct interdisciplinary studies on economy and other global forces: IIASA

Eric's professor recommends that he understand the original model in the simulation and go through literature to understand savings and lifetimes.
Tony - wants to start fundamentally on convergent prices and how information flows with pricing mechanisms.
- Zero-intelligence Agents- Economic science association conference
- JEBO- paper by Mizuta, giving agents access to order book with offers to buy and sell-- enormously stabilizing
Tony's advisor wants him to first do analytics, then do simulation
Stephanie- is going to look into interbank lending and the credit crunch, then if possible, look into CDS contracts
- Prof Steiglitz has a technical description of credit crunch by a WWS professor affililated with the Econ dept

Tony should look into auctions
Stephanie will write up API documentation on the banking code.
Framework interface is set up to define arbitrageurs like hedge fund. The entrepreneurs are arbitrage firms.
Presentation by Prof. Vichnevetsky: "World" Modeling and Simulation
Bib-tech: allows you to sort citations

Paper summaries: To migrate to the main website at minsim.cs.princeton.edu. Will create a bibliographic list, with links to popups with summaries.
Tutorial
- Should be assessable to everyone
- Getting started page
- Step by step instructions
- Eclipse cheat-sheet
- Applications to COS444 and other classes
Tony: locality problems to be looked into
Machine learning responses to bidding strategies
- Ausubel + Cramton paper

Back to MinSim.