A Framework of Oligopolistic Market Simulation with Coevolutionary Computation.

The paper presents a new framework of oligopolistic market simulation based on coevolutionary computation. The coevolutionary compu-tation architecture can be regarded as a special model of the agent-based computational economics (ACE), which is a computational study of economies modeled as dynamic systems of interacting agents. The supply function equilibrium (SFE) model of an oligopolistic market is used in simulation. The piece-wise affine and continuous supply functions which have a large number of pieces are used to numerically estimate the equilibrium supply functions of any shapes. An example based on the cost data from the real-world electricity industry is used to validate the approach presented in this paper. Simulation results show that the coevolutionary approach robustly converges to SFE in different cases. The approach is robust and flexible and has the potential to be used to solve the complicated equilibrium problems in real-world oligopolistic markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]