Basic endogenous-money economy: An agent-based approach

Abstract

We present an agent-based model of a simple endogenous-money economy. The model simulates agents representing individual persons who can work, consume, invent new products and related production technologies, apply for a loan from the bank and start up a business. Through the interaction of persons with the firms, we simulate the production of goods, consumption and labour market. This setting allows us to explore how an endogenous-money economy may build up from scratch, as an emergent property of actions and interactions among heterogeneous agents, once the money is being injected into a non-monetary self-production (or barter) economy. We provide and discuss the results of several computational experiments under three scenarios: (1) with just one firm, (2) with a limited number of firms and abundant workforce, (3) and with unlimited number of firms. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.