Chris Hibbert - 2010-10-04

On 9/30/10 12:35 AM, SourceForge.net wrote:
> First of all、great job with Zocalo, I love it!
Thanks.

> I am a research student at Kyoto University and I'm thinking of using
> your program in my research.
>
> I want to use it for a prediction market where traders can buy two
> or more comｍodities, but It seems though that you can only use one
> commodity in Zocalo. Is there a possibility to expand it to two or
> more?

There are two main configurations of the system, reflected in the two packages on Sourceforge.net. One supports economics experiments, and the other provides more general markets.

The experiments version is designed to support controlled experiments in which a small number of participants start out on relatively even terms, and are repeatedly led through a simple scenario. The parameters allow some variety, but this configuration is oriented about a single simple trading screen that allows traders to buy or sell one unit of a good at a time, and reflect the available and accepted offers.

The prediction market configuration (which has also been used for lab experiments) is more open ended. Traders can navigate between different commodity markets, but it doesn't have the features for controlling the timing of market opening and closing, nor does it provide for an experimenter role who gets a report on the scores of the subjects over the course of the experiment.

So the software does support multiple commodities, just not in the simple experiment configuration.

> Furthermore, I can't find how to get the same view as in this
> screenshot:http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=140256&ssid=37107>

That's from the general prediction market.

> Until now I been able to install Zolcalo and use some
> configurations,i.e. CarryForward.

And that's in the experiment configuration.

So you might try downloading the prediction market configuration and see whether it makes sense for the kinds of experiments you're interested in.

I'll be happy to answer more questions.
Chris