Multi-Agent Based Modelling of an Endogenous-Money Economy

Abstract

We present an agent-based model of a simple endogenous-money economy. The model simulates agents representing individual persons who can work, consume, invent new products and related production technologies, apply for a loan from the bank and start up a business. Through the interaction of persons with the firms, we simulate the production of goods, consumption and labour market. In order to achieve a significant level of realism of the simulations, the firms are modelled as adaptive agents using an effective reinforcement learning approach in continuous space. This setting allows us to explore how an endogenous-money economy can be built up from scratch, as an emergent property of actions and interactions among heterogeneous agents once money is injected into a non-monetary self-production (or barter) economy. In the paper, we first empirically investigate the learning capability of the firm agents. Then, we discuss the results of some computational experiments under different significant scenarios.