The recent increase in the breath of computational methodologies has been matched with a corresponding increase in the difficulty of comparing the relative explanatory power of models from different methodological lineages. In order to help address this problem a universal information criterion...

The present paper aims to test a new model comparison methodology by calibrating and comparing three agent-based models of financial markets on the daily returns of 18 indices. The models chosen for this empirical application are the herding model of Gilli & Winker, its asymmetric version by...

The paper proposes a new algorithm for finding the confidence set of a collection of forecasts or prediction models. Existing numerical implementations for finding the confidence set use an elimination approach where one starts with the full collection of models and successively eliminates the...

The maximum entropy methodology is applied to the Schelling model of urban segregation in order to obtain a reliable prediction of the stable configuration of the system without resorting to numerical simulations. We show that this approach also provides an implicit equation describing the...

An information-theoretic thought experiment is developed to provide a methodology for predicting endowment distributions in the absence of information on agent preferences. The allocation problem is first presented as a stylised knapsack problem. Although this knapsack allocation is intractable,...

Comparison of macroeconomic simulation models, particularly agent-based models (ABMs), with more traditional approaches such as VAR and DSGE models has long been identified as an important yet problematic issue in the literature. This is due to the fact that many such simulations have been...

Large scale, computationally expensive simulation models pose a particular challenge when it comes to estimating their parameters from empirical data. Most simulation models do not possess closed form expressions for their likelihood function, requiring the use of simulation-based inference,...

An information-theoretic thought experiment is developed to clarify why the maximum entropy methodology is appropriate for predicting the equilibrium state of economic systems. As a first step, object allocation problems, modeled as knapsack problems, are shown to be equivalent to congestion...