Combining antropology & complexity science, anyone?

[Jurgen van der Pol]

LS,

Does anybody know of, or has any pointer to any information, 
references, work done in our community on the combination of 
complexity science and antropology (c.q. psychology/social sciences 
in general)?

What I'm after is no less than to model a human being. That is, 
figure out some form of acceptable abstraction of it's 
'particularities'. After due deliberation the past year, I've come to 
the conclusion that when applying complexity science theory to 
management science issues (as I'm trying to do in my PhD), the human 
factor (or elements of) is often missing or abstracted beyond 
recognition in lots of the work that's (being) done so far (then 
again, my literature study is not complete so fire away).

Case in point: John Sterman's Beer Distribution Game. Comes out of 
the system dynamics corner, simulates a supply chain (retail outlet, 
wholesaler, factory ect) for beer (or any other good). 'Market' 
demand rises once in round 2 of the game and stays flat ever after, 
inventories in the supply chain go bullwhippingly out of control 
nonetheless. Now, try to model this in an agent based modelling 
environment. Yes, you can have the supply chain's constituents, and 
have beer shipped around. But how do you 'model' e.g. the 
wholesaler's 'anxiety' of running out of stock and thus a.o. cause 
the bullwhip effect? I'm at a complete loss on how to do that, save 
for a random number generation on an 'anxiety' gene in an agent but 
that's just too simple to my taste.

Other example; I can have a supply chain modelled to what we know of 
ant behaviour, but how do I capture the fact that warehouse manager A 
hates the guts of warehouse manager B and thus goes out to have his 
coffee first rather than responding to the urgent urgent fax from Mr. 
B, thus causing the whole supply chain to become unbalanced?

All this ran me into considering 'les particularites humaine' as a 
modelling layer -on top of- a simple thing (sic) like a supply chain. 
Can I construct a bunch of agents that 'just interact' and display 
human behaviour in all it's idiocraties? Thus, I (think I) need to 
somehow bridge a gap between what we know on human behaviour through 
antropology (yes, human behaviour -is- predictable to some extent) 
and complexity science/ABM etcetera. So I need to know whether 
something similar has alrady been considered, tried, written up, 
modelled, referenced, ...

Anyways, hope this makes some sense. Also hope someone can either set 
me straight and/or help me on my way in this...

Thanks, cheers,
Jurgen van der Pol



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