An agent-based model of consumer demand

This paper studies an agent-based model of consumer demand. Agents are heterogeneous with respect to their preferences and incomes. There are two basic ingredients in the model. The first ingredient is a metric that captures the degree of heterogeneity between agents. The second ingredient is a serial computer algorithm that is used in order to compute a terminal consumption bundle at which income is exhausted and overall utility is maximized. Agents are clustered into heterogeneous groups based on their preferences and incomes. We extract information about the evolution of consumer expenditure under different price regimes and the buildup of optimal demand for varying levels of income and preference parameter values. These features cannot be obtained in the classical framework of static utility maximization. Our agent-based data-driven methodology can be applied to any relevant data set and so provide a reliable model for forecasting demand given some agent characteristics.