Improving Learning in Business Simulations with an Agent-Based Approach

Artificial society simulations may provide unprecedented insight into the intricate dynamics of economic markets. Such an insight may help solve the well-known black-box dilemma of business simulations, where designers prefer model concealment over model transparency. The core contribution of this work is an agent-based business simulation that models the marketplace as an artificial society of consumers. In the simulation, users assume the role of a store owner playing against an artificial intelligence competitor. The simulation can be accessed via a graphical user interface that animates the decision behavior of consumers. Consumers are modeled as agents with concrete beliefs, intentions and desires that act to maximize their utility and accomplish their purchase plans. We claim that unlike the classical equation-based approach, the visualization of market dynamics facilitated by our agent-based approach can provide important information to the user. We hypothesize that such information is key to understanding several economic concepts. To validate our hypothesis, we conducted an experiment with 30 users, where we compared the effects of the graphical animation of the market. Our results indicate that the agent-based approach has better learning outcomes both at the level of users' subjective self-assessment and at the level of objective performance metrics and knowledge acquisition tests. As a secondary contribution, we demonstrate by example how simple codification rules at the level of the utility functions of agents allow the emergence of diverse macroeconomic behavior of a two-product duopoly.