Simulating Social Phenomena

In this book experts from quite different fields present simulations of social phenomena: economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, organisational scientists, decision scientists, geographers, computer scientists, AI and AL scientists, mathematicians and statisticians. They simulate markets, organisations, economic dynamics, coalition formation, the emergence of cooperation and exchange, bargaining, decision making, learning, and adaptation. The history, problems, and perspectives of simulating social phenomena are explicitly discussed.

In numerous contributions from various disciplines, the book presents an overview of the different methods and problems of modelling and simulating social phenomena.

Social Simulation - A New Disciplinary Synthesis.- I Simulating in the Social Sciences: History, Problems, and Perspectives.- Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences.- Social Science Simulation - Origins, Prospects, Purposes.- Can Agents Cover All the World?.- A Laboratory for Agent Based Computational Economics: The Self-development of Consistency in Agents' Behaviour.- From the Margin to the Mainstream: An Agenda for Computer Simulations in the Social Sciences.- Computer Simulated Empirical Tests of Social Theory: Lessons from 15 Years' Experience.- Modelling a Society of Simple Agents: From Conceptual Specification to Experimentation.- II Cooperation, Exchange, and Coalitions.- Bargaining Between Automata.- What to Do with a Surplus.- Spatially Coevolving Automata Play the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.- A Spatial Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Game Simulation with Movement.- Cooperation as Illusory Hill-Climbing: Co-adaptation and Search in Social Dilemmas.- Cooperation Without Memory.- Tributes or Norms? The Context-dependent Rationality of Social Control.- In What Kinds of Social Groups Can "Altruistic" Behaviors Evolve?.- Global vs. Local Social Search in the Formation of Coalitions.- Exchange and Challenge in Collective Decision Making.- III Markets, Organisations, and Economic Dynamics.- Market Organisation.- Market Organizations for Controlling Smart Matter.- Personnel Policies, Long Term Unemployment and Growth An Evolutionary Model.- Agent-Based Keynesian Economics.- An Evolutionary Approach to Structural Economic Dynamics.- Macroeconomic Interdependence and Frequency Locking.- Organizational Actors and the Need for a Flexible World Representation.- Concurrency and the Logic of Economic Organization.- Models and Scenarios for EuropeanFreight Transport Based on Neural Networks and Logit Analysis.- An Evolutionary Urban Cellular Automata: The Model and Some First Simulations.- Simulating Multiparty Systems.- IV Learning and Adaptation.- Co-ordination and Specialisation.- Modelling Meta-Memes.- Innovation and Imitation as Competitive Strategies: Revisiting a Simulation Approach.- A Simulation of Adaptation Mechanisms in Budgetary Decision Making.- Searching for the Next Best Mate.- Adaptive Artificial Agents Play a Finitely Repeated Discrete Principal-Agent Game.- Foreknowledge in Artificial Societies.- Would and Should Government Lie about Economic Statistics: Understanding Opinion Formation Processes through Evolutionary Cellular Automata.- V Statistics.- Simulation for Statistical Inference in Dynamic Network Models.- Permutation Techniques for Testing Homogeneity of Social Groups from Questionnaire Results.- Sketching Life Paths: A New Framework for Socio-Economic Statistics.- New Goods and the Measurement of Real Economic Growth: Summary Results Using the XEcon Experimental Economy.