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Simulations vs. Surveys


Notes:

Quantifying this type of infrastructure is much harder than its physical counterpart.

One option is the ‘bottom up’ simulation approach – designing numerous agents who interact in a virtual organization –
Another alternative is survey-based analysis – with which I’m sure you are all quite familiar.
The simulation can supply a theoretically unlimited supply of detailed data – but it’s unclear if it accurately reflects the reality of an organization of actual people.
Surveys provide a more convincing picture of the organization – yet there are inherent biases in self-report data and most importantly the data is quite sparse.
Now, I got the pleasure of meeting Tom Sniders yesterday during his workshop where he introduced Siena – a program which seems pretty good at fitting this type of sparse survey data, and I would like to create something similar, but for much from sensors.



Current research on modeling organizations:

SugarScape
U Michigan – agent based models of competition and cooperation
Organizational Evolution Lab
Ross Hammond's corrupt/honest A-society

“inference by abduction”