Title: Modelling with Low Cognition Agents in the Social Sciences

Speaker: Paul Ormerod, Volterra, Inc., London, UK

Date/Time: Tuesday, July 24, 2007, 10:00 am – 11:00 am

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract:  The conventional approach of economics assumes high levels of information gathering and processing ability by agents.  The research agenda of the past two decades is showing increasingly that these assumptions are unrealistic.  In general, agents reason poorly and act intuitively.  The assumption of low cognition, almost paradoxically, enables much more successful models to be built.  Illustrative examples will be given.  

Speaker Bio: Paul Ormerod read economics at Christ’s College Cambridge, followed by the MPhil in economics at St Catherine’s College Oxford.  He started his career as a macro-economic forecaster and modeller at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, London, where he published many applied macroeconomic papers and edited the first collaborative volume between UK and US scholars on macroeconomic modelling. In the early 1980s, he moved to the private sector and with colleagues built up the Henley Centre, selling it to a FTSE 100 company in 1992.  He established Volterra Consulting in 1998.

His main interests are in complex systems and social networks.  Ormerod has a particular interest in modelling socio-economic systems with low cognition agents (decision makers), a behavioural pattern in complete contrast to the assumptions of rational maximisers in economics.  He wrote the lead comment piece on how this can rebuild economics in the Financial Times in November 2006. Ormerod has published since 2000 a wide range of papers on these topics in journals such as Physica A, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Futures, Economic Affairs , Diplomacy and Statecraft and Acta Physica Polonica B. He has published 3 best-selling books on economics, which have been translated into many languages.  The Death of Economics (1994), Butterfly Economics (1998) and Why Most Things Fail (2005).  This latter was the lead book review in Nature and Science, and is a Business Week US Business Book of the Year 2006.  Ormerod is profiled in the June 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

CSRI POC: Richard Colbaugh, (505) 284-4116