| Some aspects of economic systems (eg, nonlinearity, qualitative variables) are intractable when incorporated into models. The widespread practice of excluding them (or greatly limiting their role) produces deviations of unknown size and form between the resulting models and the reality they purport to represent. To explore this issue, and the extent to which a change in methodology can improve tractability, a combination of two techniques, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, was applied to the problem of how the sellers in a freely competitive market, if initially trading at different prices, can find their way to supply/demand equilibrium. A multi-agent model was used to simulate the evolution of autonomously- learnt rule-governed behaviour, (i), under... |
