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Contact: Professor Nigel Gilbert
Tel. (01483) 259173
Fax. (01483) 306290
EMail n.gilbert@soc.surrey.ac.uk
This project is concerned to examine theoretical approaches which suggest that people develop strategies for making economic choices as consumers on the basis of trial-and-error learning and observation of the strategies of those around them. It is of particular interest because it uses Distributed Artificial Intelligence techniques at the cutting edge of experimental social science. The research uses information on the budgetary decisions of recently-retired single people as the basis for the work and seeks to construct computer programs that mimic the way people in fact make decisions. The programs represent individual decision-making, and are designed to modify decisions as they encounter more successful choices by other programs within the experiment. The pattern of choices that emerges can then be compared with survey data on the choices people actually make. The key question is whether the outcome of the whole process is one that provides a satisfactory representation of what in fact happens in everyday life.
The project has strong implications for the development of social science which uses artificial intelligence simulations. The potential for building on this project elsewhere is reinforced by the fact that the program to be used can also be adapted to apply to social choice in other contexts and that the project team intend to offer training in its use to other social scientists. It will also improve understanding of the evolution of social and cultural values, if these can be seen as the outcome of processes analogous to those the computer programme contains. The work will also shed light on the way in which people faced with an abrupt change in their personal circumstances tackle budgetary decision-making.
NIGEL GILBERT is Professor and Head of Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. He has researched and written extensively on the sociology of science and more recently on human/computer interaction, and is co-editor of Simulating Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Phenomena, (with J. Doran, University College London Press, 1993).
EDMUND CHATTOE is Research Fellow at the University of Surrey and at the Institute of Economics and Statistics at the University of Oxford.
Papers associated with this project:
What are We Simulating Anyway? Some Answers from Economics
Go to the Budgetary Decision Making Project Web pages.