Aggregation of Information and Communications Industry and Self-organization Simulation Using an Agent-based Model

As a preliminary step to conducting a self-organization simulation of the concentration and dispersion of the information and communications industry, we will quantify the spatial concentration of the information and communications industry in large cities in Japan. Spatial analysis of the information and communications industry in Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka, which are regional core cities, in addition to the 23 wards of Tokyo, was conducted using Chocho data from the "Economic Census." As a result of detecting spatial autocorrelation in small area units in each city, hotspots indicating concentration of information and communications business establishments were detected in the city center of each city. At the same time, we were able to confirm the influence of the economy of agglomeration, which is the premise of the self-organization model, and also recognized that the information and communications industry is an industry that is suitable candidate for simulation of the self-organization phenomenon. Krugman (1996) first formulated the self-organization phenomenon in the city and clarified the emergence principle of the peripheral city, but it was limited to numerical simulation. After that, Kumar et al. (2007) used actual data to show the possibility of applying Krugman's self-organization model to predict the concentration and dispersion of firms. In this paper, we examined whether the self-organization model is effective for reproducing and predicting the accumulation and dispersion of the information and communications industry in Japanese cities by using the agent-based model.