Delayed information flow effect in economy systems. An ACP model study

Applying any strategy requires some knowledge about the past state of the system. Unfortunately in the case of economy. collecting information is a (difficult, expensive and time consuming process. Therefore, the information about the system is usually known only at the end of some well-defined intervals, e.g. through company, national bank inflation data and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reports, etc. They describe a (market) situation in the past. The time delay is specific to the market branch. It can be very short (e.g. stock market offer is updated every minute or so and this information is quasi-immediately available) or long, like months in the case of agricultural markets, when the decisions are taken based on the results from the previous harvest. The analysis of the information flow delay can be based oil the Ausloos-Clippe-Pekalski (ACP) model of spatial evolution of economic systems. The entities can move on a (square) lattice and when meeting take one of the two following decisions: merge or create a new entity. The decision is based on the system state, which is known with some time delay. The effect of system's feedback is hereby investigated. We consider the case of company distribution evolution in a heterogeneous field. The information flow time delay implies different final states, including cycles; it is like a control parameter in a logistic map. (C) 2007 Elsevier BN. All rights reserved.