Human Agents in ABMs

[Darren Schreiber]

UCLA and Caltech recently opened CASSEL (California Social Science 
Experimentation Laboratory), a computer lab designed for large scale 
experiments (see more details at http://www.cassel.ucla.edu/.) 
Economists, for instance, have theories about how people should 
behave when they play certain games like the prisoner's dilemma (Do 
you defect or cooperate when their are costs and benefits?)  At this 
lab, they can have computers facilitate the play of these games and 
thus test the theoretical results from game theory.

So, I left the open house thinking about how to take my Swarm models 
and replace the agent algorithms with humans.  If people behave like 
my model assumes they do, then we should be able to have humans make 
the decisions rather than my agents and still get the same kind of 
results.

I am wondering if anyone has given thought to how one might convert 
an agent-based model running on a single computer into a model where 
the input came from a bunch of people in a lab of networked computers 
playing the game in real time.  This may not help the fish modelers a 
lot, but I think for social scientists who are doing ABM's this is a 
worthwhile direction to explore.  Let me know your thoughts - 
technical or theoretical.


        Darren



--

_____________________________________________

                 Darren Schreiber
                  Attorney at Law
                 Graduate Student
             Political Science, UCLA
                address@hidden
        http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~dschreib


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