A multiagent simulation of a stylized French labor market: Emergences at the micro level

The aim of this work is to design a multiagent system (MAS) simulation to model the French labor market. We departed from an economic model proposed by Cahuc and Carcillo to model the introduction of a new job contract into the labor market. We designed a specific methodology to convert this equation-based model to an agent-based model, and calibrated our MAS to reproduce the data found in the economic simulations. As we observed the same tendencies found in the former model, a new dimension emerged from the agent-based simulation: an increase of oscillations for the characteristic rates, revealing an increase of precariousness ( job instability) due to the new type of contract. Moreover, our simulation enabled us to detect and correct some flaws of the Cobb-Douglas type of matching function. These encouraging results led us to continue in that direction, where several extensions of our model can be proposed, including the move to a large-scale simulation framework.