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The activities of Laboratory for Socio-Historical This website will stay accesible, but not updated (in archive mode) Many thanks to everyone that has cooperated helping us For further information, please, contact Miguel.Quesada@uab.cat |
The Laboratory for of Socio-historical Dynamics Simulation (LSDS) of UAB, has the goal to coordinate, promote and disseminate activities carried out at the UAB, related with computational simulation of social systems. It also offers advisory and training services to public and private organizations involved in research and management which could use simulation and experimentation methodologies in virtual environments.
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"What methodology would social scientists adopt if we could start over?... We are living through several simultaneous revolutions in the social sciences: big data, human subjects experiments, network science, and exponentially-growing computer hardware and software. Each of these has the potential to alter the methodologies employed by social scientists, and taken together they have the potential to revolutionize what we do. But we still teach students about rational actors, econometrics based on aggregate data (instead of micro-data), equilibrium, well-mixed interactions (no networks), and how to do analytical, pen-and-paper calculations. In this talk I ask, were we able to start over, would we even bother with Nash equilibria, perfect information, common knowledge, frictionless markets, and so on? If an alternative grounding for social theory exists, what are the barriers to its adoption today? Specifically, could relatively simple, heterogeneous agents who interact directly with one another via networks or space, away from equilibrium, serve as an alternative foundation for a modern, computationally-enabled social science?". |
| (Robert Axtell, Keynote Talk at Santa Fe CSSSA, Oct. 2015) |
