In
this paper we present TRADES, a data-driven agent-based simulator for barter
trade exchanges. We provide an
overview of the barter trade exchange industry, focusing on the operational
aspects of trade exchanges and motivating the design of our simulator. Our simulator is built by learning
probabilistic models of company purchase behavior using transaction history
data from an operating trade exchange.
We quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of our simulator by comparing
simulated trade to the transaction data, showing a high degree of agreement
between the two. We
also demonstrate use of the simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of a
particular trade brokering strategy.