EOS               Beta-test

Economics via Object-oriented Simulation


Eos, goddess of dawn, painting by Evelyn De Morgan (1850-1919), 1895

An open-source project devoted to the highly structured simulation of complete economies, making strong use of inheritance, and a very few high-level primitives.


The three abstraction levels of the Java framework (M. Adelson)

The guiding principle of this project is Henry Hazlitt's Lesson:

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

(Economics in One Lesson, second edition, Three Rivers Press, 1988.)
Ken Steiglitz (ken at cs) is director of this project, which is based in the Department of Computer Science, Princeton University.

Prof. Michael Honig, Northwestern University, is a principal collaborator.

The talented labor is provided by Princeton undergraduates. Spring semester 2009, a team of three students, Michael Adelson '11, Chris Rucinski '10, and Cody Wang '10 began by scrapping previous incarnations of this agent-based work, and together developed a general, extensible, and hierarchical framework for economic simulation in Java. I hope that it will be the starting point for an open-source project that can demonstrate fundamental economic principles in concrete terms, and, ultimately, become a testbed for evaluating policies in realistically large and complex models of whole economies.

The following reports and code represent the result of the spring's work, which, as mentioned, was collaborative and overlapping.

Michael Adelson's documentation of the EOS framework (doc) (pdf)

Chris Rucinski's project report (pdf)

Chris Rucinski's code (tar'd and zipped)

Cody Wang's project report (doc)

Cody Wang's code (tar'd and zipped)

Previous developers:
Daniel Hayes-Patterson '09
Chris Chan '08
Hideyuki Mizuta, IBM Japan

Previous contributors:
Tony Hu '10
Eric Vreeland '10
Stephanie Tzeng '09
Erez Lirov '99
Sheehan Maduraperuma '99
Jocelyn Lenormand '98
Liadan O'Callighan '98
Daniel Shapiro '97
Leonard Cohen '94

Friends and advisors:
Peter Wayner '86
Prof. Leigh Tesfatsion, Iowa State University

For lots of material and links to related work see Leigh Tesfatsion's home page.

My previous publications in this general area
Last modified: Wed Aug 26 02:56:27 EDT 2009