Simulating Payoff Distribution in Networks of Economic Agents.

Simulating the behavior of economic agents fosters the analysis of interconnected markets' dynamics. Here, we extend the state-of-the-art by adding realistic details to simulating economic exchange networks. To this end, we use our economic network simulation framework TrEcSim, which is designed to support the following real-life features: specific complex network topologies, evolution of economic agent roles, dynamic creation of new economic agents, diversity in product types, dynamic evolution of product prices, and investment decisions at agent-level. Using TrEcSim, we simulate and determine the point at which the networks (having different topology types) transition from being a topocratic system to becoming a meritocratic one. Simulation also allows for analyzing the dynamic evolution of producers and middlemen distribution in the economic exchange network. Moreover, we gain valuable insight regarding the distribution of payoff for each agent-role in various economic exchange networks, as follows: when producers are assigned randomly to topological positions, the payoff distribution within the producers category is fat-tailed (only a handful of producers benefit from an increased payoff), while the payoff of the middlemen category closely resembles a normal (Gaussian) distribution. However, when the topological positions of producers are assigned preferentially, the payoff distributions of the two role categories reverse.