When Learning Goes Rogue: Fixing RL Biases in Economic Simulations
TL;DR for operators Simulation is a dangerous place to confuse optimisation with truth. Chen and Zhang’s paper, From Individual Learning to Market Equilibrium, shows that a reinforcement learning agent can optimise very successfully and still fail to reproduce the economic equilibrium it was supposedly simulating.1 That is the useful sting in the paper. The failure is not that the RL agent is too weak. The failure is that the environment quietly gives the agent the wrong economic role. ...