Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation: A Case Study of Market and Supply-Chain Co-design in the PC Industry1

The Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations (SEAS) developed at the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University mimics real life economies, with multiple interlinked markets, multiple goods and services, multiple firms and channels and multiple consumers etc. all built from the ground up. It is populated with human agents who make strategically complex decisions and artificial agents who make simple but detail intensive decisions. These agents can be calibrated with real data and allowed to make the same decisions in this synthetic economy as their real life counterparts. The resulting outcomes can be surprisingly accurate. This paper discusses the research in this area and goes on to detail the architecture of SEAS. It also presents a detailed case study of the application of SEAS for business-to-business ecommerce in the PC industry. 2 This research was funded by National Science Foundation grants # EIA-0075506 and DMI-0122214.