Kuala: Agent-based Modeling Tools for the Economics of Design

This is a short note describing the software I wrote for my dissertation research. The software is partitioned into two layers, the infrastructure layer and the modeling layer. Ongoing efforts will focus on (a) rendering obsolete as much of the infrastructure layer as possible, either by replacing generic functionality with code provided by tools maintained by others or contributing code to such tools, and (b) fleshing out the modeling layer to be useful to a more targeted community of researchers with a shared interest in the economics and strategy of system design. ∗School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Email: [email protected]. The software described in this note has benefited from the input of my committee, especially David Parkes, and from many people in the agent-based modeling community, including Rob Axtell, Mark Diggory, Laszlo Gulyas, John Miller, and Scott Page.