par Bersini, Hugues 
;van Zeebroeck, Nicolas
Référence Complex systems, 21, 1, page (21-36)
Publication Publié, 2012
;van Zeebroeck, Nicolas Référence Complex systems, 21, 1, page (21-36)
Publication Publié, 2012
Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | This paper provides a new look at the well-known trade-off between efficiency and equality with an agent-based model. By way of a computer program, our study simulates the interactions of agents producing and trading goods within different market structures and looks at the resulting production and distribution of welfare among agents at the end of an arbitrarily large number of iterations. Two market mechanisms are compared: the competitive market (a double auction market in which agents outbid each other in order to buy and sell products) and the random market (in which products are allocated randomly). Our results first confirm that the superior efficiency of the competitive market comes at a very high price in terms of inequality, compared with the random market. We further explore the effect of agent rationality in production and auctioning (i.e. different information sets used or not by the agents in making their choice) and observe that although rationality affects efficiency only at the margin, inequalities can be very strongly affected by the behaviour of the agents. This latter result suggests that market mechanisms can ensure optimal efficiency under certain constraints (as shown by Gode and Sunder 1993), but that the degree of inequality emerging from a certain market design can strongly depend on the rationality of the agents. |
