Analysis on the number of XCS agents in agent-based computational finance

Abstract

An agent-based simulation developed as a tool to analyze economic system and social systems since the 1990s. Previous paper reported that the simulation results indicated that the number of agents affects the trading prices and their distributions. To analyze the effect of the number of agents, this paper analyzes the relationship between the number of agents and simulation results using XCS agents for artificial trading. We report the market price fluctuation and population size of internal model by the number of agents. The revealed the following remarkable implications: (1) increasing number of XCS agents does not affect the convergence of population size of all agents; and (2) all agents converge towards approximately form 15 % to 20 %of population size by learning classifier system of XCS agents; and (3) increasing number of XCS agents reduce the variance of the market price.