Call for Email comments and announcement:

Roundtable discussion on: ACE (Agent based Computational Economics), EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND DATA ANALYSIS

Co-Organizers: Blake LeBaron (U of Wisconsin, blebaron@ssc.wisc.edu) and Chris Preist (Hewlett Packard, cwp@hplb.hpl.hp.com

This session will be part of: Computation in Economics, Finance, and Engineering Economic Systems Cambridge, UK, June 29--July 1, 1998

Several invited speakers will lead this discussion. However, in recognition of the fact that many people may not be able to attend the meeting, I would like to summarize some comments submitted over email. I will present various emailed comments (keep them less than 2 pages) on the following topics:

QUESTIONS AND DATA REPORTING: Critical examination of the types of questions currently posed in ACE frameworks, the experimental designs constructed for examining these questions, the types of data collected, and the possible use of multi-media (sound, color, geometric shape) to report and interpret this data.

HYPOTHESIS TESTING AND GOODNESS OF FIT: Critical examination of the extent to which current ACE frameworks exploit standard statistical techniques for the testing and validation of hypotheses and the measurement of goodness of fit. Are new types of statistical techniques needed?

PARAMETER SPECIFICATION AND SENSITIVITY: Critical examination of the extent to which ACE applications undertake and report parameter sensitivity tests, and the extent to which stylized facts, natural data, and human-subject experimental data have been or could be used to pin down parameter values.

REPLICABILITY: Critical examination of the extent to which ACE applications have been able to establish replicable interpretable relations between structural specifications and evolutionary outcomes. Also, to what extent has the results of ACE applications have been replicated across alternative software and hardware platforms.

An emailed transcript of the meeting will be sent back to all email contributors. Send comments for discussion to:

Blake LeBaron at blebaron@ssc.wisc.edu Dept. of Economics, University of Wisconsin =========================================================================