A MULTIAGENT SIMULATION OF A STYLIZED FRENCH LABOR MARKET: EMERGENCES AT THE MICRO LEVEL

Abstract

The aim of this work is to design a multiagent system (MAS) simulation to model the French labor market. We departed from an economic model proposed by Cahuc and Carcillo to model the introduction of a new job contract into the labor market. We designed a specific methodology to convert this equation-based model to an agent-based model, and calibrated our MAS to reproduce the data found in the economic simulations. As we observed the same tendencies found in the former model, a new dimension emerged from the agent-based simulation: an increase of oscillations for the characteristic rates, revealing an increase of precariousness (job instability) due to the new type of contract. Moreover, our simulation enabled us to detect and correct some flaws of the Cobb–Douglas type of matching function. These encouraging results led us to continue in that direction, where several extensions of our model can be proposed, including the move to a large-scale simulation framework.Multiagent simulation, labor market, emergence