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Marco Janssen Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics Arizona State University, USA. Changing the rules of the game: experiments with humans and virtual agents Many resource problems can be classified as commons dilemmas, a dilemma between the interest of the individual and the interest of the group as a whole. During the last decades substantial progress has been made in understanding how people can avoid the tragedy of the commons. However, we lack good understanding how people change institutional arrangements over time in an effective way in an environment with dynamic resources. I will discuss the initial results of a project where we look at innovation of institutional arrangements in common pool resource management where we combine laboratory and field experiments with agent-based modeling. In laboratory experiments groups share resources in a dynamic spatially explicit virtual environment, while the pencil and paper field experiments in Colombia and Thailand include various types of resources (fishery, foresty and irrigation). Using the individual level data derived from the experiments we develop and test agent-based models to derive better understanding of the experimental data. We also use the agent-based models to explore the evolution of institutional rules in various contexts that we could not (yet) experiment with. Going back and forth between experiments with humans and virtual agents is a fruitful way to develop empirically-based agent-based models. I will discuss methodological challenges experienced in this project as well as initial results of the various models. |
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David Hales University of Bologna Social Simulation for Self-Star Systems: An idea whose time has come? "I will talk about, what I believe, are the increasing similarities between open problems in distributed systems engineering and recent research topics in agent-based social simulation. Specifically, engineers of software components in massive (millions of entities) open systems are asking how those components can come to self-organise, self-repair and self-manage in a bottom-up manor: so called self-* systems. Inspiration has been drawn from biological systems and also, but more rarely, social systems. Yet many of the questions agent-based social simulators address are central to key engineering issues in self-* systems:
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