Agent-based simulation and greenhouse gas emissions trading

The need for new theoretical and experimental approaches to understand dynamic and heterogeneous behavior in complex economic and social systems is increasing. An approach using agent-based simulation and artificial markets on a computer system is considered to be an effective approach. Computational simulation with dynamically interacting heterogeneous agents is expected to re-produce complex phenomena in economics, and helps us to experiment various controlling methods, evaluate systematic designs, and extract the fundamental elements which produce interesting phenomena for future analytical work. In previous work, we investigated the stability of a virtual commodities market and the aggregated behavior of dynamic online auctions with heterogeneous agents. In this paper, we introduce a simple framework to develop agent-based simulations systematically and consider an application of agent-based simulation for a dynamical model of international greenhouse gas emissions trading.