There has been much talk about using social distancing as a response to the Coronavirus outbreak. Here’s a video of how social distancing can be used: Close Contact, where the population is infected very rapidly. This is not A Good Thing – the national health service is overwhelmed, and the death rate goes up as …
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The United Kingdom is at a crossroads, an ideological battle between natural science and behavioral science. Let’s hope for all our sakes we get this one right. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is facing a dilemma. When do we go from the so-called containment phase for controlling Covid-19 Coronavirus, to the delay phase. In …
Continue reading “Coronavirus: The First Big Test of Behavioral Science”
This presentation including joint work with Alberto Franco, was presented at the IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) conference in Quebec City, QC, Canada. We present two different agent-based models for simulating human behavior. We use the example of group decision making. The first model uses a cognitive fitness landscape to model the quality …
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Eight Mile, epitomized by Eminem in the film of the same name, is a street in Detroit that marks the boundary between the majority white northern suburbs and the majority black neighborhoods closer to the inner city. But what causes this segregation in the first place? Hypothesis 1: The Central Planner In Detroit’s case, as …
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In 2003, as part of a project to document coastal erosion in California, the following photo was posted on the californiacoastline.org website. It is a picture of a beach, some cliffs, lots of trees, and a rather nice house complete with swimming pool, that turns out to be the home of one Barbara Streisand. For those not …
Continue reading “The Unintended Consequences of Unintended Consequences”
I am organizing a session at IFORS on Simulating (Human) Behavior as part of a Behavioural Operational Research stream. It would be good if other agent-based models could be presented. To submit a paper, please do so here: http://ifors2017.ca/submit-abstract and use invitation code dfa90f58
This presentation from the EURO 2016 conference in Poznan, Poland, and from the GDN conference in Bellingham, WA, USA, joint work with Leroy White of Warwick Business School, shows how combining formal and informal organizational networks enables decisions to flow more freely around organizations, but at a cost, leading to an optimal size of informal …
Behavioral Operational Research: Theory, Methodology and Practice (Martin Kunc, Jonathan Malpass, Leroy Wright, Eds.) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2016. My chapter on Agent-Based Modeling and Behavioral Operational Research shows the great potential of using agent-based simulation within BOR, showing how example models can be applied to the field. More details of the chapter can be found on the …
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