Collaborative Research: Modeling the Social Actor

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This research is based on a comprehensive multi-scaled, multi-disciplinary approach to study complex information age issues that involve the combination of people and the information and communication technologies they use. This study extends work on social actors, developed through prior NSF-funded research. The social actor is an empirically derived model of people+ information and communication technologies (ICTs). To make this model useable for a wider community of researchers and policy- makers, who need robust models with solid measures of attributes and behaviors that conflate people and their technologies, some formalization of the social actor is required. Using metrics derived from institutional theory, appropriate measures based on social actor concepts will be developed and related to formal models and theories of cognitive understanding and collaborative decision making to establish a better basis for reasoning about ICT-infused environments. A theoretically supported, empirically grounded, social actor model will then be used to simulate dynamic agents, with scenarios developed in collaboration with RAND organization researchers. The empirical work will involve modeling social actors as people + IC in organizational and institutional settings using agent-based systems (ABS). Agent-based modeling allows a researcher to examine complex adaptive systems with sophisticated computational models that integrate empirical research and formal modeling. These systems help researchers and policy-makers explore the dynamic issues that attend the complex interactions of collaborative and competitive social units.