Brightline II was written in Java and has been tested on various Wintel machines. Brightline II will not run on a Mac. For Windows users, the Java Runtime Version 1.3 is required. Unsupported users may run the original version of Brightline instead. 

Once the main Brightline window comes up you can then Run, Pause, Step-cycle or Reset the simulation using the buttons at the bottom of the screen.

The five large colored ovals are the Company agents. The five boxes above each oval represent the Shareholders of that Company, and the small black boxes represent Customers, with the Government agent represented by the large horizontal oval at the top. As the run progresses the five Company agents compete for Customers by lowering prices - which they can only do by increasingly externalizing costs.

At some point the externalizing activities of each Company may exceed 'legal' levels. This is indicated by the appearance of the Company name in the applet. White lettering indicates legal levels of externalization, and black indicates illegal levels.

This concept of externalized costs is the key behavioral element that Brightline is intended to demonstrate. In future versions of Brightline we hope to further discriminate between varying types and degrees of externalization, i. e. accounting fraud, environmental crime, negative customer health consequences, excessive impact on government and "capture" of public goods, insider trading profits, excessive contingent lawyers fees and unreasonable levels of executive compensation, etc.

Both the Shareholder agents and the Government agent monitor the externalizing activities of the Company agents and react accordingly. 

Shareholders, looking to maximize their investment return, will be happiest (green) when their Company's performance is high. If their market share begins to fall off the shareholders will turn yellow, indicating a state of dissatisfaction. 

The Government monitors both each Company's individual externalization level AND the cumulative total of externalization by all corporate agents. It will become potentially active (regulatory) and turn red when the cumulative total reaches a certain level, reflecting an overall negative public response to industry practices as a whole. Once active the Government agent will then begin to penalize the most highly illegally externalizing Companies, and as each Company is fined it will momentarily flash in indication. Fined Companies are required to return to legal levels of externalization for a number of cycles before they can begin again to exceed such limits.

One key additional feature of Brightline is intended to test and illustrate the effect of active shareholders interacting with one of the Companies. This effect occurs when three or more of the 'focus' Company agent's Shareholders become "Active," which is indicated by those Shareholders turning red. Only one of the Companies is seeded with this potential.  These Active Shareholders thereafter will prevent their Company from breaking the law - from exceeding the Government agent's legal limit for individual corporate externalization.

The bar charts at the bottom of the applet window (Brightline II only) indicate both cumulative earnings (adjusted for present value) and cumulative externalization levels for each company. Will the presence of Active Shareholders prove out to be a competitive advantage or disadvantage? This is one of the key questions which Brightline is intended to reveal and illustrate.

In the full application version of the program these numbers may be output to Excel or another spreadsheet or database application for statistical analysis. Due to certain built-in randomization factors in the program, intended to insure data integrity, significant patterns may only be determined through such analysis; a single run of the program using a given set of parameters should NOT be considered conclusive. To facilitate such study the full application version also permits unattended batch runs, at a much higher speed of execution than is shown here.

In the full application version essentially all of the program's runtime variables or parameters can be set by the user, permitting a wide range of testing and experimentation of the basic Brightline concepts.  In the applet version users may select from a number of pre-established parameter sets, using the provided drop-down menu. These sets are described in full on the 'Customizing Brightline' page.

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