Agent based social simulation

Description A computer assisted technique for knowledge elicitation assists in building rules of how people respond to a variety of stimuli and scenarios of environmental and social conditions. Agent based social simulation is a relatively formal approach to stakeholder and institutional analysis. It is a computer programming method that uses software agents to represent the positions, boundaries, and actions of stakeholders. This approach is one of the few means to realistically simulate the behavior of stakeholder networks in the context of the rules, norms, and shared strategies from social and economic institutions. This approach can be applied at various stages of an assessment. One example is that agent based social simulation can incorporate socioeconomic scenarios that are constructed as sets of rules regarding, for example, environmental values, regulation, and economic goals. An advantage of this approach is that the realization of socioeconomic scenarios is the outcome of stakeholder behavior rather than being exogenously imposed in a way that bears little relation to actual decision making processes.