Computational experimentations in market and supply-chain co-design: a mixed agent approach

The synthetic environment for analysis and simulations (SEAS) is a computational experimentation environment that mimics real life economies, with multiple interlinked markets, multiple goods and services, multiple firms and channels and multiple consumers, all built from the ground up. It is populated with human agents who make strategically complex decisions and artificial agents who make simple but detail intensive decisions. These agents can be calibrated with real data and allowed to make the same decisions in this synthetic economy as their real life counterparts. The resulting outcomes can be surprisingly accurate. This paper discusses the research in this area and goes on to detail the architecture of SEAS. It also presents a detailed case study of market and supply-chain co-design for business-to-business e-commerce in the PC industry.