Re: Simulating Individual Behavior

[Jan Kreft]

Mark,

thanks for the pointers.

Mark P. Line wrote:

> ......
> There is a tradition of (social) microsimulation going back to G. Orcutt
> (1957) "A new type of socio-economic system", _Review of Economics and
> Statistics_ 58: 116-123 and then the classic Orcutt, G. et al. (1961)
> _Microanalysis of Socioeconomic Systems: A Simulation Study_
> (NY/Evanston/London).
> 
> There's also the more recent Orcutt, G. et al (eds.) (1984)
> _Microanalytic Simulation Models to Support Social and Financial Policy_
> (Amsterdam).
> ......
> The Germans have been doing (social) microsimulation like this in grand
> style for about twenty years now, including official applications to
> federal policy. Most approaches that I'm aware of distribute parameters
> across agents based on dependent frequency distributions that have been
> derived from disparate aggregate data sources. I think this may be
> equivalent to the kind of "back-calibration" you suggest here, in that
> failure to validate a model must necessarily feed back into the
> assumptions used to estimate the initial population (and its agents'
> parameters). These models never (AFAIK) used anything more
> agent-specific than statistical cohorts derived from the dependent
> distributions.
> 
> Although there is a mountain of literature in German, my favorite is a
> published dissertation:
> 
> Helmut Vetterle (1986) _Konstruktion und Simulation mikroanalytischer
> Modelle. Die Methode der Mikrosimulation und ihre Anwendung_ ("Design
> and Simulation of Microanalytical Models: Method and Application of
> Microsimulation"). Augsburg: MaroVerlag. >150 refs.
> 
> I suspect that this book is out of print, and that there is no English
> translation. If I can get Vetterle's consent, I'd be willing to put the
> dissertation on my website in the foreseeable future, and even translate
> part of it into English -- if there's any interest. (Maybe this is all
> old hat and I'm making a fool of myself -- somebody kick me if that's
> the case.)
> 

That would be fine! Would you make that diss available? I, personally,
don't need a translation but most people will :-(.

Jan.

> .......



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