An Agent-Based Simulation of the Swiss Labour Market : An Alternative for Policy
number of strategies that a worker can consider and the maximum number of previous periods he can remember .
Each firm opens vacant positions and receives applications ; it then randomly chooses one applicant , who fits with the firm ’ s skills requirement ( the hiring process probability depending on the history of the applicant and on a random parameter ). The worker always accepts the first offer he gets .
At present , the population level is considered stable , assuming that the simulation covers a short period of time , during which the workforce does not significantly change . The level of randomness ( considering the simple structure of the model ) is low , giving the user the power to tune most of the aspects of the simulation .
c . Functional Specification
In conjunction with firms and worker agents , that are the most important agents in the model , there are different variables that contribute to define the simulation environment .
• Firms ( Nfirm ), that hire workers , assumed fixed in time and space ;
Table 1 — Firm ’ s state variables
Name Type Description Updating Initialization firm
region |
patch |
place where the |
|
|
firm is located |
fixed randomly assigned
Nvacancy N = 1 + random 10 |
number of available vacancies |
volatile |
randomly assigned |
sector |
N = [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] |
firm ’ s |
|
|
economic |
|
|
sector |
fixed randomly assigned
Factory employed |
N ≤ Nvacancy |
employed number in the firm |
volatile |
computed |
|
|
20 |
|
|