Describing economic agent-based models—Dahlem ABM documentation guidelines

Abstract

At the 100th Dahlem conference “New Approaches in Economics after the Financial Crisis” a working group devised guidelines for the documentation of computational economic agent-based models, based upon – but differing from – the ODD protocol Grimm et al. (2006, 2010). This paper sketches the motivation for coming up with a new set of guidelines tailored to economic multi-agent modelling, and presents these. While analytical economic models can often be precisely and concisely stated by a few equations together with an economic interpretation of their elements, a computational agentbased model, as a conceptual piece of work, may not always be a very tangible entity. For example, it is represented by but usually not identical to the (many) equations constituting the computer code. It is therefore not always easy to describe the model in a way that provides the reader with a thorough understanding of the model. The present guidelines are an attempt at standardizing such descriptions to support understanding and communication, as well as the comparability of economic multi-agent models.