you write that you are planning a symposium and that you are looking for researchers who use agent based models for looking at the management of common properties. This raised my interest and I would like to address to you some questions.
I used to be a theoretical ecologist who has moved into the field of modelling socio-economic systems over the recent years. We are interested in improving the understanding of the relevance of the complexity of socio-economic systems for sustainable development. Together with Simon Levin I try at the moment to organize a research program at the SFI on this topic. We have several people in Europe (S. Moss, R. Conte, K. Binmore) who are very interested in participating. Please find enclosed a short abstract stating the major goals of this workshop. Since you plan such a symposium I suspect that you are also working in this field. I would be very interested to learn more about your research activities and whether you might be interested in such a research program at the SFI.
Another question along these lines. The UNECSO has decided to make an Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems http://www.eolss.co.uk. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides integrated coverage in six Areas: Global Sustainable Development, Water, Energy, Environment,
Food and Agriculture, and Knowledge Foundations. I was asked to be the theme editor for the topic Hierarchy and Complexity and Agent Based Modeling. At the moment I am designing the outline of this theme and I'm looking around for authors who could make a contribution to this topic. I'd like to ask whether you might in general be interested in joining such an effort.
Best wishes
Claudia Pahl-Wostl
Sustainability, Complexity, and Cognition
proposal for a workshop at the SFI
Sustainable development requires non-marginal changes that cannot be discussed in an equilibrium framework. However, mainstream economic theory has little to offer to explain evolutionary change in socio-economic systems. Even when general equilibrium may have disappeared from the front pages in most theoretical economics journals, it is still very influential in contemporary economic thinking and in models used for policy advice. A modelling effort which shows convincingly the presence of lock in effects, identifies business opportunities and possibilities for increasing returns to scale regarding for example energy efficient technologies would provide important arguments in the current public debate. The SFI has been one of the promoters of dealing with complexity in socio-economic systems. Its transdisciplinary environment and experience in exploring the dynamics of complex systms would be ideally suited for developing a research agenda dealing with complexity and sustainability, tackling thus one of the most pressing contemporary problems.
The research questions that have to be addressed focus on the complexity of the dynamics of socio-economic networks. The complexity has two main origins: the complex dynamics arising from the interactions among diverse agents and the complexity arising from the behaviour of individual agents. Therefore an important research topic will be the development of concepts and models that focus on the mutual relationship between processes of social and individual learning, between micro and macro-level, between individuality and the embededness in social networks.
Cognition is a source for complexity that is poorly represented in current economic theory. We will explore different representations of agents that are based in established theories of cognition. One cannot say in advance what the necessary degree of reductionism and the necessary degree of agent complexity should be. We will investigate means of aggregating over these agents in order to reduce computational expense without accuracy of our representations with respect to relevant observations. The question of the appropriate level of aggregation and the appropriate level of agent representation will be a major topic of such a research program.
Using such a modelling approach one can account for the different ways of the interaction of agents with their social and natural environment. We will represent the influence of information, the attitude towards and the perception of risks, different levels of individual and social values, the expectations of a positive future etc.
We will account for the importance of specific internations in social networks. Regarding social networks, using concepts from ecological theory might prove very fruitful. One needs to account for the importance of network structure and dynamics. The emergence of new technologies, for example, can be compared to the invasion and succession of species. The notion of the niche might be an interesting concept that could find a more widespread application in economics. The niche of a consumption product can be defined by its market share which is determined by the product's fitting into a functional context and by its price versus benefit ratio. But the niche is as well socially constructed by the perception of individual consumers who are themselved embedded in a network of social relations. The success of radical innovations requires thus the emergence of new product identities.
The goal of the planned workshop is to bring together people from the field of complex systems theory, economics, ecology, social simulation, social and cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence to discuss the possibilities for a common research agenda around the topics summarized above. The workshop might lay the foundations for a new research program at the SFI.
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