Collaborative Research: Modeling the Social Actor

本研究以综合、多尺度、多学科的方法研究复杂的资讯时代问题，涉及人与他们所使用的资讯与通讯技术的结合。这项研究扩展了对社会行为者的研究，该研究是通过先前的国家科学基金会资助的研究发展起来的。社会行为人是人+信息和通信技术（ict）的经验推导模型。为了使这个模型适用于更广泛的研究人员和政策制定者群体，他们需要有可靠的模型来衡量将人与他们的技术相结合的属性和行为，需要对社会行动者进行某种形式化。利用源自制度理论的指标，将开发基于社会行动者概念的适当措施，并将其与认知理解和协作决策的正式模型和理论联系起来，为对信息通信技术注入的环境进行推理建立更好的基础。一个理论支持的、基于经验的社会行动者模型将被用来模拟动态代理，并与兰德组织的研究人员合作开发场景。实证工作将涉及使用基于主体的系统（ABS）在组织和制度设置中将社会行为者建模为人+ IC。基于代理的建模允许研究人员使用集成了实证研究和正式建模的复杂计算模型来检查复杂的自适应系统。这些系统帮助研究人员和政策制定者探索参与合作和竞争社会单位复杂互动的动态问题。

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.