SWIEE — a Swarm Web Interface for Experimental Economics

The goal of this work is to show the advantages of using the Swarm simulation platform as a tool for making Experimental Economics. A complex project, called SWIEE, will be presented. Furthermore, some useful examples will be proposed to spread this approach in the experimenters’ community, nowadays accustomed to use closed and proprietary programs. The idea of using Swarm for Experimental Economics derives from the possibility it gives to write simulations in the Java programming language, known to be object oriented and very useful for networked applications. Java allows the design of programs in which an object method can be called by other applications running on computers connected to the Internet, so the RMI (i.e. Remote Method Invocation) standard Java classes are the core of this new usage of Swarm. Furthermore, we illustrate an example (the prisoner’s dilemma) and we report some methodological considerations on the possibility of making experiments considering the Internet like a sort of virtual open laboratory. Finally, we display some future developments of the project, in particular those, very interesting, related to the construction of experiments (or better “simulative” experiments) with both human and artificial agents. More information about SWIEE can be obtained from its web pageshttp://swiee.econ.unito.it