Displaying 10 of 50 results for "Alistair Law" clear search
Researcher at LASTIG lab (https://www.umr-lastig.fr)
Agent based modeling and simulation for social sciences
Model exploration
I have been involved in agent-based modelling since the early nineties with a consistent attention to methdological improvement, institutional development and empirical issues. My mission is that ABM should be a routinely accepted research method (with a robust methodology) across the social sciences. To this end I have built diverse models and participated in research projects across economics, law, medicine, psychology, anthropology and sociology. I took a DPhil in economics on adaptive firm behaviour and then was involved in two research projects on money management and farmer decision making. Since 2006 I have worked at the Department of Sociology (now the School of Media, Communication and Sociology) at the University of Leicester. I was involved in the founding of JASSS and (more recently RofASSS https://rofasss.org) and have regularly served on the review panels for international conferences in the ABM community.
Decision making, research design and research methods, social networks, innovation diffusion, secondhand markets.
Paul Hart BSc (Liverpool), BA (Open University), PhD (Liverpool), MAE, FLS, FMBA. From 1973-1976 I worked on the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey at the Oceanographic Laboratory, Edinburgh. From 1973 – 1976 I was employed by Nordreco AB (a Nestlé R & D company) in Sweden as a fishery biologist where he advised the Findus group on fish raw material supplies and assessed the future potential of aquaculture. In 1976 I moved to the University of Leicester as a lecturer in aquatic biology. My research focused on the foraging behaviour of fish with a side interest in marine commercial fisheries. I retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology and am now an Emeritus Professor. I was a Trustee of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, which ran the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey until it was merged with the Marine Biological Association: I then became a Trustee of the MBA. From 2010 – 2016 I was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. I am co-author of Fisheries Ecology (1982) and co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries (2002). I was a co-editor of the journal Fish and Fisheries (Wiley) between 2000 and 2021.
IBMs of fisheries exploring management options and consequences of social behaviour.
Social network analysis has an especially long tradition in the social science. In recent years, a dramatically increased visibility of SNA, however, is owed to statistical physicists. Among many, Barabasi-Albert model (BA model) has attracted particular attention because of its mathematical properties (i.e., obeying power-law distribution) and its appearance in a diverse range of social phenomena. BA model assumes that nodes with more links (i.e., “popular nodes”) are more likely to be connected when new nodes entered a system. However, significant deviations from BA model have been reported in many social networks. Although numerous variants of BA model are developed, they still share the key assumption that nodes with more links were more likely to be connected. I think this line of research is problematic since it assumes all nodes possess the same preference and overlooks the potential impacts of agent heterogeneity on network formation. When joining a real social network, people are not only driven by instrumental calculation of connecting with the popular, but also motivated by intrinsic affection of joining the like. The impact of this mixed preferential attachment is particularly consequential on formation of social networks. I propose an integrative agent-based model of heterogeneous attachment encompassing both instrumental calculation and intrinsic similarity. Particularly, it emphasizes the way in which agent heterogeneity affects social network formation. This integrative approach can strongly advance our understanding about the formation of various networks.
Displaying 10 of 50 results for "Alistair Law" clear search