WICI Talk: Testing Institutional Arrangements via Agent-Based Modeling: A U.S. Electricity Market

Testing Institutional Arrangements via Agent-Based Modeling: A U.S. Electricity Market

The recent economic crisis has led to calls for a comprehensive restructuring of U.S. financial, energy, and health care systems. Critics worry that the restructuring of these complex systems could produce unintended consequences, resulting in lower rather than higher efficiency and reliability. Given these concerns, pre-testing of proposed changes is eminently desirable, but also exceedingly difficult. This talk will focus on the potential use of agent-based test beds for the systematic exploration of proposed changes in institutional arrangements in advance of actual implementation. An agent-based test bed designed for the study of restructured U.S. electricity markets will be used for concrete illustration.

Speaker Profile: Leigh Tesfatsion

Leigh Tesfatsion is a Professor of Economics, Mathematics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. She specializes in agent-based computational economics (ACE) and the computational study of economic processes as dynamic systems of interacting agents. Her recent research has focused on the development and use of an ACE test bed to systematically study restructured U.S. electricity markets with smart grid functionality.