tesfatsi@iastate.edu
The Trade Network Game (TNG) Lab is a computational laboratory for the investigation of evolutionary trade network formation among strategically interacting buyers, sellers, and dealers. The TNG Lab is targetted for the Microsoft Windows desktop. The TNG Lab has a clear, easily operated graphical user interface. It permits visualization of the formation and evolution of trade networks by means of real-time animations. Data tables and charts reporting descriptive performance statistics are also provided in real time.
A report containing a detailed presentation, motivation, and illustration of the TNG Lab is available, as follows:
The main body of this report is available online in postscript (ps) and in adobe portable document format (pdf), and figures for the report are available in a separate html file, at the following sites:
Version 2000b of the TNG Lab has been released as freeware by David McFadzean, Deron Stewart, and Leigh Tesfatsion (the copyright holders) under the terms of the Artistic License Agreement online at http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/alicense.htm. An automatic installation program for the TNG Lab (Version 2000b) is available online as a zip file http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/tlab00b.zip (2.6MB). Unzipping this zip file will produce four files in addition to this readme file:
Execution of setup.exe will install the TNG Lab in a directory of the user's choice. The installation will create three files:
Execution of wintng.exe will start the TNG Lab, which opens in the Setting Screen. When the TNG Lab is run, real-time data is generated and displayed in a variety of formats: in tabular numerical form on the Results Screen; in the form of charts on the Charts Screen; and in the form of a network animation on the Animation Screen. The physics of the animation can be customized to the application at hand by means of parameter settings available on the Physics Screen. These five screens can be accessed at any time by means of labelled buttons appearing on each separate screen.
In addition, when the TNG Lab is run, detailed output data is read into a tng.out file in the same directory in which wintng.exe resides.
Configuration files for the TNG Lab must end in the extension tng. Default.tng is the default configuration file for the TNG Lab. The user can enter and run different parameter settings from the TNG Lab Settings Screen. The "Save As" option on the TNG Lab menu bar can be used to save parameter settings to customized configuration files for later use as long as these files end in the extension tng. These configuration files can be opened and read into the Settings Screen by using the "Open" option on the TNG Lab menu bar.
At present the "Print" option on the TNG Lab menu bar is not functional. Moreover, for better clarity, the Chart Screen only displays fitness (profit) levels ranging from -1.00 to 4.00. Consequently, to use the Chart Screen, payoffs for trade interactions should be scaled so that the average fitness levels of the buyers, sellers, and dealers lie in this range.
The file St6unst.log contains a detailed log of all working files installed on the user's computer during the installation of the TNG Lab. This log file can be used to uninstall the TNG Lab by hand if an automatic "uninstall program" option is not available on the user's computer.