Artificiality in Social Sciences

This text provides with an introduction to the modern approach of artificiality and simulation in social sciences. It presents the relationship between complexity and artificiality, before introducing the field of artificial societies which greatly benefited from the computer power fast increase, gifting social sciences with formalization and experimentation tools previously owned by "hard" sciences alone. It shows that as "a new way of doing social sciences", artificial societies should undoubtedly contribute to a renewed approach in the study of sociality and should play a significant part in the elaboration of original theories of social phenomena.artificial societies; multi-agent systems; distributed artificial intelligence; complexity

Artificiality in Social Sciences

This text provides with an introduction to the modern approach of artificiality and simulation in social sciences. It presents the relationship between complexity and artificiality, before introducing the field of artificial societies which greatly benefited from the computer power fast increase, gifting social sciences with formalization and experimentation tools previously owned by "hard" sciences alone. It shows that as "a new way of doing social sciences", artificial societies should undoubtedly contribute to a renewed approach in the study of sociality and should play a significant part in the elaboration of original theories of social phenomena.Comment: 14 page

Ethical trust and social moral norms simulation : a bio-inspired agent-based modelling approach

The understanding of the micro-macro link is an urgent need in the study of social systems. The complex adaptive nature of social systems adds to the challenges of understanding social interactions and system feedback and presents substantial scope and potential for extending the frontiers of computer-based research tools such as simulations and agent-based technologies. In this project, we seek to understand key research questions concerning the interplay of ethical trust at the individual level and the development of collective social moral norms as representative sample of the bigger micro-macro link of social systems. We outline our computational model of ethical trust (CMET) informed by research findings from trust, machine ethics and neural science. Guided by the CMET architecture, we discuss key implementation ideas for the simulations of ethical trust and social moral norms

A Percolation-Based Model Explaining Delayed Take-Off in New-Product Diffusion

A model of new-product diffusion is proposed in which a site-percolation dynamics represents socially-driven diffusion of knowledge about the product's characteristics in a population of potential buyers. A consumer buys the new product if her valuation of it is not below the price of the product announced by the firm in a given period. Our model attributes the empirical finding of a delayed ``take-off'' of a new product to a drift of the percolation dynamics from a non-percolating regime to a percolating regime. This drift is caused by learning-effects lowering the price of the product, or by network-effects increasing its valuation by consumers, with an increasing number of buyers.new-product diffusion, innovation adoption, spatial stochastic processes, percolation

Tackling model selection and validation : an information theoretic criterion

Simulated economies suffer intrinsically from validation and comparison problems. The choice of a suitable indicator quantifying the distance between the model and the data is pivotal to model selection. However, how to validate and discriminate between models are still open problems calling for further investigation, especially in light of the increasing use of simulations in social sciences. In this paper I present a new information theoretic criterion to measure how close models' synthetic output replicates the properties of observable time series without the need to resort to any likelihood function or to impose stationarity requirements. This indicator is sufficiently general to be applied to any kind of model able to simulate or predict time series data, from simple univariate models such as Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) and Markov processes to more complex objects including agent-based or dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. More specifically, I use a simple function of the L-divergence computed at different block lengths in order to select the model that is better able to reproduce the distributions of time changes in the data. To evaluate the L-divergence, probabilities are estimated across frequencies including a correction for the systematic bias. Finally, using a known data generating process, I show how this indicator can be used to validate and discriminate between different univariate models providing a precise measure of the distance of each model from the data

Dynamics of Quality Perception in a Social Network: A Cellular Automaton Based Model in Aesthetics Services

AbstractAn attempt was carried out to simulate interactions between customers and providers, and understand the rationality of a social network using a cellular automata model. A longitudinal research study was conducted, based on a dyadic perspective in aesthetics clinics, approaching clients and service providers. The evolution of opinions regarding the associated service quality was then modeled with a cellular automaton. Based on an existing and valid scale of service quality, six semi-structured interviews with clients and service providers were carried out. The indicators were then refined and two quantitative surveys were performed, with a time interval of four months. A cellular automaton rule was then searched for that could simulate the network rationality between the two surveys. The proposed cellular automaton model achieved an accuracy of 73.80%, a higher value than the ones typically found in linear regression models of the service quality literature. The simulation allowed to understand which behaviours adopted by providers and customers generate an improved perception of service quality. The simulation also identified dissatisfied individuals in the social network and the way they influence the network. These findings may help managers to control employees' conducts and the service performance

The Role of Influentials in the Diffusion of New Products

This dissertation comprises three separate essays that deal with the role of influentials in the diffusion of new products. Influentials are a small group of consumers who are likely to play an important role in the diffusion of a new product through their propensity to adopt the product early and/or their persuasive influence on others’ new product adoption decisions. The literature labels these consumers as opinion leaders, social hubs, innovators, early adopters, lead users, experts, market mavens, and boundary spanners. This dissertation integrates two perspectives that researchers have mostly studied independently: market-level, which investigates the spread of a new product (e.g., total number of products sold) across markets over time as a function of aggregate-level marketing and social parameters; and individual-level, which considers how to identify influentials and their impact on the adoption behaviors of others. The first essay reviews and integrates the literature on the role of influentials in the diffusion of new products from a marketing management perspective. The study develops a framework using the individual- and market-level research perspectives to highlight five major interrelated areas: the two theoretical bases of why influentials have a high propensity to adopt new products early and why they considerably influence others’ adoption decisions, the issues concerned with how marketers can identify influentials and effectively target them, and how significant individual-level processes lead to significant market-level behavior. The study synthesizes the relevant research findings and suggests future research directions for improving our knowledge of the role of influentials in the diffusion of new products.The second essay explores firms’ decisions regarding the selection of target consumers for seeding—providing free products to enhance the diffusion process. The study examines the profit impact of targeting five groups of potential consumers for seeding under alternative social network structures. The findings suggest that seeding programs generally increase the net present value of profits. Moreover, social hubs—the most connected consumers—offer the best seeding target under most conditions that were examined. However, under certain conditions firms can achieve comparable results through random seeding and save the resources and effort required to identify the social hubs. Finally, the interactions among several variables—the choice of seeding target, consumer social network structure, and variable seeding cost—impact the returns that seeding programs generate and the ‘optimal’ number of giveaways.The third essay explores the adverse impacts of three types of consumer resistance to new products—postponement, rejection, and opposition—on firm profits. The study investigates these effects across five groups of consumers and alternative social network structures. The findings suggest that complex interactions between three groups of parameters—resistance, consumer social network, and diffusion parameters—affect the relationship between resistance and profits. Moreover, opposition reduces firm profits to a degree that is significantly greater than rejection and postponement. Finally, influential resister groups generally have stronger adverse impacts on profits than do randomly designated resisters

History, historians and development policy

The substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability of historians to contribute. There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. These include insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference; history is a resource of critical and reflective self-awareness about the nature of the discipline of development itself; and history brings a particular kind of perspective to development problems . After establishing the key issues, this book explores the broad theme of the institutional origins of economic development, focusing on the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. It demonstrates that scholarship on the origins of industrialisation in England in the late eighteenth century suggests a gestation reaching back to a period during which a series of social institutional innovations were pioneered and extended to most citizens of England. The book examines a paradox in China where an emphasis on human welfare characterized the rule of the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty, and has been demonstrated in modern-day China's emphasis on health and education. It provides a discussion on the history of the relationship between ideology and policy in public health, sanitation in India's modern history and the poor health of Native Americans. The book unpacks the origins of public education, with a focus on the emergency of mass literacy in Victorian England and excavates the processes by which colonial education was indigenized throughout South-East Asia