10,867 research outputs found
Complexity, Pedagogy and the Economics of Muddling Through
This paper was first presented at the AEA meetings on complexity. It was later published in a book edited by Massima Alszano and Alan Kirman, Economics: Complex Windows, Springer Publishers.
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
Adaptive Regulation in the Amoral Bazaar
Twelfth Oliver Schreiner Memorial Lecture,delivered on 20 October 2010 at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Many gradual changes in science, law and society are crystallizing to shape a significant transformation in administrative law. The doctrinal framework within which Justice Schreiner himself attempted to modernize how law should regulate government and private economic activity seems from our vantage point to be quite antiquated. In explaining why, my examples will come from the world of financial services, but they could easily be found anywhere in the area of law and regulation. First I will outline the basic premises of prevailing doctrine and its growing shortcomings. Then I will describe developments in our understanding of the social ecologies through which law and regulation is transfused. I will consider some of the implications for the way in which we need to think about future regulation in order to be more effective in this complex world. We are moving from a framework of directive regulation to one that has to become much more adaptive. While my talk will focus on understanding markets as evolutionary social ecologies, and the consequences this has for administrative law and regulation, it is also important that these amoral bazaars be grounded on a foundation of moral aspiraton and integrity. I will therefore conclude with a reminder that we ignore at our peril the urgent responsibility of redeveloping a moral framework within which markets should operate
Symptoms of complexity in a tourism system
Tourism destinations behave as dynamic evolving complex systems, encompassing
numerous factors and activities which are interdependent and whose
relationships might be highly nonlinear. Traditional research in this field has
looked after a linear approach: variables and relationships are monitored in
order to forecast future outcomes with simplified models and to derive
implications for management organisations. The limitations of this approach
have become apparent in many cases, and several authors claim for a new and
different attitude.
While complex systems ideas are amongst the most promising interdisciplinary
research themes emerged in the last few decades, very little has been done so
far in the field of tourism. This paper presents a brief overview of the
complexity framework as a means to understand structures, characteristics,
relationships, and explores the implications and contributions of the
complexity literature on tourism systems. The objective is to allow the reader
to gain a deeper appreciation of this point of view.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; accepted in Tourism Analysi
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Evaluating the resilience and security of boundaryless, evolving socio-technical Systems of Systems
Resilience in rural common-pool resource management systems: towards enhancing landscape amenities using a multi-agent approach
Rural areas are continuously subject to changing circumstances, varying from changes in ecosystem conditions to socio-economic changes like food- and financial crises. Within Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is driver as well for change of rural common pool resources (CPR). Rural CPRs are defined as rural social-ecological systems which provide landscapes with high agricultural, ecological and cultural-historical values. The conservation of these systems is treated as the enhancement of these values through the protection of rare plant species. Analyzing resilience of rural CPRs offers a framework to emphasize dynamics and interdependencies across time, space and between social, economic and ecological domains. This paper provides insight into the effects of CAP reforms on rural CPRs and its resilience, through the use of a multi-agent simulation approach. The advantage of such a multi-agent approach is that it allows to capture interactions of heterogeneous agents in a landscape that provides space for both agriculture and rare plant species. The simulation model is applied for Winterswijk, which is a rural region in eastern part of the Netherlands. This CPR is characterized by a small scale landscape with high biodiversity. Transferring insights from resilience thinking to rural development strategies would lead to a focus on the factors that build the ability of the rural area to respond to policy changes. The strength of multi-agent models is illustrated and their potential for the analysis of different policy options and implications in rural areas is shown
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