Granted, simulations are a tricky thing. They can never cover the whole complexity of a complex system – like the economy. For us though, the simulation is not a means for academic exercise or to model as close as possible reality. It would serve the purpose of getting a feeling of the dynamics of such a system and to get a communication vehicle.

Of course, we could easily set up a 3 years monster project to apply the best methodology, consult relevant information and implement a thoroughly elucidated theoretical foundation into simulation software. However, we don’t think we have this time.

We focus on getting a compromise between speed of implementation and sufficiently significant modeling, allowing us to spot trends and tendencies in the system.

Ideally this would provide us with information on how to parameterise the system, to eliminate any obvious fallacies and to feedback into the theoretical framework.

We are currently validating assumptions for the simulation, which we want to setup as an agent based system. On the feasta website, there is a thread discussing the assumptions for the simulation.