🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello.  I'm newcomer to economics; my background is in statistics
and optimization.  I'm working on a project involving the recycling
of old newspapers, and I want to model how the markets have evolved
and what might happen down the road.  The phrase "applied microeconomics"
might sum up what I want to try.

I've read the Project Independence report and the criticisms of it
(US energy planning from the 1970s, using a LP to solve some
complementarity conditions) and it didn't "feel right" -- assumptions
of supply/demand curves, the linearization, the model's voracious
appetite for data.

Anybody have any suggestions, or references to other models or
approaches in the literature?

Thanks.  Apologies if this seems somewhat naive... I'm just getting started.