The complexity of the intangible digital economy: an agent-based model
用基于主体的模型研究无形数字技术对经济的影响，发现其导致生产率提高、市场锁定和失业率上升，对宏观经济学和产业组织研究者有参考价值。
During the last decades, we have witnessed a strong development of intangible digital technologies. Software, artificial intelligence and algorithms are increasingly affecting both production systems and our lives; economists have started to figure out the long-run complex economic implications of this new technological wave. In this paper, we address this question through the agent-based modelling approach. In particular, we enrich the macroeconomic model Eurace with the concept of intangible digital technology and investigate its effects both at the micro and macro level. Results show the emergence of the relevant stylized facts observed in the business domain, such as increasing returns, winner-take-most phenomena and market lock-in. At the macro level, our main finding is an increasing unemployment level, since the sizeable decrease of the employment rate in the mass-production system, provided by the higher productivity of digital assets, is usually not counterbalanced by the new jobs created in the digital sector.