As described in our paper on Competitive Benchmarking, the Power TAC platform is designed to support several types of empirical research. Tournaments pit competitive brokers against each other in a series of simulations, to test and validate both broker designs and the simulation models. Experiments can be designed to test specific hypotheses, by choosing some feature of the simulation model or of a broker to vary, and then determining the effect of that variation on broker profits, or consumer prices, or price volatility, or other measurable outcomes.