OIKOS

Don't play with food

OIKOS includes three economic games: Capital, Anarchy, and Plan.

It is a platform under development, and the free server it is hosted on sometimes takes a while to start up and restarts without saving data if it is not used for a while.

In the games, you can act as an administrator and/or a player.

- The player negotiates and contrats with other players, makes deliveries, and produces.
- The administrator starts the game, adds players, and manages the phases of each session.

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In all three games, each player begins with a certain amount of wheat and iron.

The games are played in successive sessions, with two phases in each:

Phase 1: Deliveries:
- Each player can make up to five deliveries of their wheat and/or iron to other players.
Phase 2: Production:
- Each player chooses a single production process, which can be different each session:
  - Process 1: Uses 280 wheat and 12 iron to produce 575 wheat (or equivalent ratio).
  - Process 2: Uses 120 wheat and 8 iron to produce 20 iron (or equivalent ratio).
  - Process 3: The available materials are halved.
- All materials are consumed in the processes, and only the resulting product is available after production.

The delivery and production cycle repeats in each session.

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Game 1: Capital

We simulate capitalism in its most basic form: agents who exchange and produce to maximize their profit.

The winner is the player who obtains the greatest amount of wheat·a + iron·b in the final session, where a and b are set by the administrator and are not made public until the end of the game. The final session is also not announced.

Contracts can be signed to guarantee deliveries and form companies.

Game 2: Anarchy

We simulate a market with different objectives: agents who exchange and produce to maximize their individual goals.

The objectives can be set:

The same for all players: for example, the winner is the one who achieves the highest sum of their wheat consumption across all sessions.
Different for each player: then a player is not compared to the others but to themselves, in comparison to other games or previous sessions.

Contracts can be signed to guarantee deliveries and form cooperatives.

Game 3: Plan

We simulate extreme planning: the planner allocates resources without market to achieve a given objective.

Deliveries are made between the production processes under the control of each player-planner, without negotiation or exchanges with other players. Each planner must have an independent room with three virtual players so they can use all the production processes.

The objective can be defined as in Capital or Anarchy.

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The games can be compared, for example, Plan versus Capital, so that some players play Capital while the rest try to beat their results with Plan.

They can also be combined, so that some players play Anarchy while others play Capital, with everyone trading in the same market.

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OIKOS is currently at version 0.1. More features will be added soon, and versions geared towards online play will be available, although this is already possible.

The free server where the application is hosted sometimes takes a while to start up and restarts without saving data if it is not used for a while; other servers would save the data. It can also be used with a personal computer as a server, for example, by installing Node.js to run the application and ngrok to access it online.

I will not be able to continue developing the application for a while, but it can be downloaded if anyone wants to continue it. It is almost finished, but, for example, it still needs a limit on the number of submissions. Please send any improvements to mmuinosp@ucm.es .

OIKOS was developed as an experiment to empirically test economic theory and as a teaching tool. OIKOS games can be used freely, without registration or participation in the research, but we greatly appreciate any contribution, such as sending the results of a game, and we will acknowledge it in any resulting publications if you wish. The game was inspired by Alfons Barceló, «Juegos de simulación con modelos económicos reproductivos», El Trimestre Económico, Vol. 56, Nº 223(3) (July-September 1989), and the first results of the test were presented with 18 co-authors at the 10th Input-Output Analysis Conference (2024). For more information or to collaborate on the project, please contact us at mmuinosp@ucm.es .

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