Simulating Trade in Economic Networks with TrEcSim

Abstract

Motivated by the large-scale applicability of complex networks, we propose a novel socioeconomic simulator inspired by empirical observations and state-of-the-art economic models. As such, our Trade and Economic Simulator (TrEcSim) is able to use any fundamental complex network topology as an underlying exchange network, and it also introduces a novel heuristic approach to drive the behavior of economic agents, according to theories pertaining to main schools of economic thought. Our simulation results indicate that TrEcSim is a valuable tool for simulating the dynamics of trade in economic networks. Indeed, our simulation results indicate a correlation between the topological properties of the economic exchange networks and the distribution of total payoff: for random and small-world the distribution is meritocratic, whereas for scale-free networks it is topocratic.