Multi-Agent Simulations to Explore Rules for Rural Credit Management in a Highland Farming Community of Northern Thailand

Abstract

Thanks to recent advances in the field of distributed artificial intelligence, agentbased models (ABM) can now be used to run simulations of social phenomena based on their computerized representations, and to apply experimental methods in social sciences (Axelrod 1997, Gilbert and Troitzsch 1999, Jager 2000). In the field of renewable resource management and environmental sciences, several ABM simulation platforms offer the possibility to explore interactions between social and ecological dynamics (Costanza and Ruth 1998, Bousquet et al. 1998, Lansing 2002). In these complex systems, the social and economic dynamics can be viewed as a set of interactions among heterogeneous agents, generating aggregate phenomena that are different from the behaviour of groups of average individuals considered in classical economic thinking (Rouchier and Bousquet 1998). Such a view was adopted in the research presented here.