Economy: Companies

This post briefly describes another structure within the economy - the company.  This is simply an entity required to provide good and services within the economy, and in the larger picture provides the simulation with a way of getting money into the pockets of the simulated population.  The basic structure of a company is shown below and has various elements that should be explained.

The basic idea is simple:  a company provides one or more goods and services, for which it may require the services of suppliers, it will require customers and it may need employees to perform work to produce the good or service.

The Decider is simply the operating mechanism of the company - it determines what the company provides and will have knowledge of what it needs from other sources to produce those goods and the manpower necessary.  It takes two general inputs, the request for contracts from suppliers which it can accept or reject, and the request for goods and services from customers, which are also processed as contracts.  By processing the provision of products as a contract (see the previous post), this same structure can be used for a company providing isolated products, like shopping, or for providing services that may last beyond a single purchase.

The Employees structure simply retains a list of who is employed, and a payment amount.  Since we don't actually have to simulate employees' work, this money is simply distributed monthly unless the Decider chooses, for example, to lay that person off.

As described above, the Contracts structure simply maintains the list of current contracts to be processed until the contracts expire.  For single shop-like transactions the contracts will be eradicated quite quickly but others, such as those pertaining to suppliers may be more persistent.

Finally, assets refers to any other object that the company owns, such as buildings, transport infrastructure, or indeed any simulated object. This provides the ability for the company to own property to act as a shop front, for example, or to be something as complex as a landlord.  It also provides the necessary capability for a transport company to operate.

The most important component is the Decider, which determines the entire behaviour of the company.  It is the entry point for scripting as a result of this, or can be overridden to be replaced by direct player control.  There is no current intention for direct support of company takeovers, shareholding or other constructs in this version, but it may well be possible to implement these without my directly supporting them.

The Decider can also, ultimately, decide if the company should close down, which can be done in an objective rules-based method, probably based on the account balance.  The other important feature will be to provide the scripts with the ability to query the model to find out things like the current state of the economy, etc.

This has been a necessarily dry and vague post, because all I've essentially done is describe a container with very little detail.  If you want more, just ask!

The company is an important structure to the economy, which is why it gets described here, but the question is always going to be:  what products  and services are going to be necessary, and how do we describe them?  That's the next post, and that's Monday's job...

Fred