readme.txt

Author:
Klaus Reiner Schenk-Hoppé

E-mail:   k.r.schenk-hoppe@leeds.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.schenk-hoppe.net

Article:
"The Great Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op: Anecdote or Evidence for the Optimum Quantity of Money?"
by Hens, Schenk-Hoppé, Vogt



Last update: January 9, 2006


This file gives a brief overview on the MATLAB scripts which have been
developed to carry out the numerical simulations in Section 4 of the above paper.
The scripts are available at the web page
http://www.schenk-hoppe.net/babysiting.html


The scripts have been tested with MATLAB 5.3.

Filename     Task                 Output    Usage

babysim.m    reproduce Table 2    text      babysim(caseno,groupno,qm,iter)
             in Section 5.1                 parameters caseno = 1 (game M.5), caseno = 2 (game M.2)
                                                       groupno = 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 if caseno = 1
                                                       groupno = 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 if caseno = 2
                                                       groupno between 1 and 6 corresponds to group in actual experiment                  
                                                       (characteristics as in Figures 4 and 5 of the paper)
                                                       groupno = 7 resp. 7,8 are artificial groups for the benchmarks


findv.m      determines maximum   text      findv(pB,pS,l,h,ph,beta)
             money holdings for             parameters pB success probability when "buy"
             optimal policy runs                       pS success probability when "sell"
                                                       l  low time value
                                                       h  high time value
                                                       ph probability of high time value
                                                       beta discounting parameter

Examples

Producing the data in Figure 7
for Group 1 Game M.2 quantity of money 3:        babysim(2,1,3,10000);
(small variations possible because of
too few iterations)

Maximum money holdings reported in Section 4.3
without rationing (pB = pS = 1)
l = 5, h = 10, ph = 0.5 (game M.5)
and discounting beta = 0.95:                     findv(1,1,5,10,.5,.95);
(maximum holdings is 4)