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Since we're talking academic: agent-based economic modeling, in which you come up with scenarios and assumptions about how different folks make decisions (which

Since we're talking academic: agent-based economic modeling, in which you come up with scenarios and assumptions about how different folks make decisions (which might be heterogeneous--e.g., your imaginary stock market could include the equivalent of the unfortunate individual investors that watch CNBC and follow bad strategies, and institutional investors, and HFTs), and you see how they play out. If your model seems to resemble the real world in interesting ways, you can simulate applying some intervention--a transaction crash, a commodity-price shock--and see how that plays out. Up to you to pick which scenarios and models to explore, of course. It's fun because you have more flexibility in the kinds of models you can toy with than if you were simply working with equations and had to assume a spherical cow, and you can connect computing with a different discipline, and you get an almost reasonable excuse to borrow some extra compute cycles for a couple of larger simulations. :)

eevilspock 12y ago
I've been thinking about similar things as educational tools, calling it interactive and illustrative simulation. The idea is help people (kids and adults) learn a variety of real-life complex systems, such as free-markets (and how they do and don't work), game theory and social behavior, the impact of money in politics, the impact of advertising on the economy and web content, etc. Users could control sliders to compare ideal situations to reality. For example, they can reduce to zero "consumer gullibility to advertising", "consumer myopia", max out "consumer intelligence", and see how the invisible hand of the free market works well. Then they can move the sliders into reality (They get to decide for themselves how far over), and see how the free market breaks down, and effects such as the Mathew Effect (rich get richer). Overlapping thoughts?

eevilspock 12y ago

I've been thinking about similar things as educational tools, calling it interactive and illustrative simulation. The idea is help people (kids and adults) learn a variety of real-life complex systems, such as free-markets (and how they do and don't work), game theory and social behavior, the impact of money in politics, the impact of advertising on the economy and web content, etc. Users could control sliders to compare ideal situations to reality. For example, they can reduce to zero "consumer gullibility to advertising", "consumer myopia", max out "consumer intelligence", and see how the invisible hand of the free market works well. Then they can move the sliders into reality (They get to decide for themselves how far over), and see how the free market breaks down, and effects such as the Mathew Effect (rich get richer). Overlapping thoughts?