WP6 A user-friendly economic simulator to be used by policy makers, to support intuition building, dialogue and dissemination. The simulator will be designed to ensure the model is transparent and not a "black box", make it easy to run experiments and scenarios, collect data, and analyze and visualize results. This will enable policymakers to run "what if" policy experiments in real time. Like the on-line game in WP 5, this will use the agent-based model developed in WP 2 and 3 and data in WP 1 as its underlying engine.

 

The idea of the simulator is to make it very easy to pose policy questions and understand the answers. The policy maker will be able to experiment with policy prescriptions and see the results of his or her prescription under different scenarios in real-time. Provided with a specific scenario, the simulator would produce a range of possible future outcomes over a given time horizon. The outcomes will be a range because there will inevitably be stochastic elements to any scenario requiring multiple runs. In this case the simulator will produce either a set of representative values or a range.

 

The ability of the simulator to explore large numbers of scenarios and parameter space, and the speed with which it will produce real-time results will naturally depend on computational efficiency and its computing platform. Computational efficiency will be taken into account throughout the design phase of the model and user interface. We also plan to build the tool so that it can both be run usefully on a PC on a policymaker's desk for developing intuition about the system and rapid hypothesis testing, but also can be used on a supercomputer for in depth analyses of large scale ensembles of runs.

 

Therefore, this WP aims at:

• creating a simulation based decision-support tool to help policy-makers analyse the modelled economic simulations;

• increasing public awareness of non-linear feedback effects in economics.