Rule-based modeling of labor market dynamics: an introduction

Labor market dynamics are not fully understood today. Their formal description often assumes homogeneity among individual agents in the labor market. Agent based frameworks allow for the faithful description of heterogeneous systems and are thus well suited for a detailed description of labor market dynamics. Here, we introduce rule-based modeling as a novel approach of agent-based modeling with regard to the description of labor market dynamics. We discuss its advantages and limitations, and we demonstrate that BioNetGen, an implementation of rule based modeling, can efficiently describe socio-economic interactions and that it compares favorably to other agent based softwares.