OPTIMAES

Money Mapping (via Exmosis)

Zby asks : why OPTIMAES assumes homogeneous societies where all agents play the same strategy, rather than mixed societies where different agents play different strategies. (And would seem to be more realistic.)

Answer :

The main reason for this at the moment is that it’s hard to see how different agent strategies would interact. Any kind of transaction is a property of a dyad (pair) that needs both to play their appropriate parts.

What would happen if a Gifting agent met a Barter agent? They’d end up having to adopt the same strategy if they were to successfully interact.

So, another move.

OPTIMAES has now left Ning for this WordPress blog.

True, I haven’t been doing much on OPTIMAES in the last couple of years, but it should at least have a decent home. Ning turned out to be flooded with spam. And now they plan to start charging. (I’m not against that per se, but I’m already paying for this hosting so might as well use it.)

Fortunately, the http://optimaes.net and http://optimaes.info URLs will continue to work, and I’m sure there’ll be another burst of OPTIMAES activity at some point soon.

Note, that I’ve tried to import blog posts from the old Blogger site and the Ning group. Unfortunately I seem to have lost dates on some of them so I’ve pretty much chosen arbitrary dates that suit the ordering I’d like to give the posts. Hope this isn’t too confusing.

Hi to Dante who’s just joined us. And thanks for adding us to the P2P Foundation’s Complementary Currency Software wiki page : http://p2pfoundation.net/Complementary_Currency_Software (…)

Interesting model of how recommendation systems reduce diversity and choice in a market. (…)

I got curious looking at the last results … does the population decline continue or does it bottom out?

Intuitively you’d think that it will bottom out somewhere because there is a sub-population who are self-sufficient (ie. for all resources, they can get more than they consume).

Does the gift economy eventually decay to the same level or can it sustain itself somewhere above that?

Here’s the same experiment run for 1000 time-steps. (As before you’re seeing an aggregate of 10 runs of a population that starts with 100 agents and declines to something around 20 to 30 … it *looks* like 1000 because of some quirks I encountered with decimals in the spreadsheet so I scaled up by x10 to whole numbers).

As you can see, although the gift-economy sustains itself for longer than the selfish foragers, it does also decline. This might be because there is still some randomness in the way the simulation works.

At each time-step, a random agent is chosen to forage, consume and optionally donate its surplus to needy neighbours. But it’s possible that for some needy, but unlucky, agents, their neighbours are never chosen and so never donate. Donation is not systematic as it was in earlier versions of OPTIMAES.

It remains to be seen if the decline of the gift economy will eventually fall to selfish forager levels.