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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts
Principled Exploration of Simulation Designs for the Study of Complex Phenomena Luis Antunes Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon Dr Antune’s main long-term research goal deals with individual decision-making and its consequences for the study of social phenomena. In particular he is concerned with how to design social simulations with rationality-heterogeneous agents and assess the outcomes of these simulation in such a way as to produce useful policy-making level recommendations. With co-workers, he has been trying to design and tune-up a methodology for the exploration of the space of designs, not only of agents, but also societies and even simulations themselves. The main ideas for this methodology (called e*plore) have been defined through the developed of a case study on tax compliance. Roughly, the central point is that instead of producing an all-inclusive, complete and thorough model for the society, they tackle the problem through the development of a series of models, each of which is intended to the in-depth exploration of a particular concept or mechanism. This covering of the design space with progressive deepening of some features is designed to manage complexity as we progress towards an ultimate model with the best features of the model series. During this talk Dr. Antunes will focus on the development of the methodology in close connection with the tax case study. Tax compliance is a challenge to individual rationality, and a rich field to explore the micro-macro link between individual choice and collective outcomes. He will also discuss some of the open issues related to several steps of the methodology and its application: the concept of incremental deepening, the role of the observer in experiments, the notion of context permeability and its relation to simulation visualisation.
The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study |
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