SISTER: a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles

Deborah Duong () and John Grefenstette ()
Additional contact information
Deborah Duong: http://www.scs.gmu.edu/~dduong
John Grefenstette: http://binf.gmu.edu/gref

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2004, vol. 8, issue 1, 1

Abstract: SISTER, a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles, captures a fundamental social process by which macro level roles emerge from micro level symbolic interaction. The knowledge in a SISTER society is held culturally, suspended in the mutual expectations agents have of each other based on signs (tags) that they read and display. In this study, this knowledge includes how to create composite goods. The knowledge of coordinating their creation arises endogenously. A symbol system emerges to denote these tasks. In terms of information theory, the degree of mutual information between the agent's signs (tags) and their behavior increases over time. The SISTER society of this study is an economic simulation, in which agents have the choice of growing all the goods they need by themselves, or concentrating their efforts in making more of fewer goods and trading them for other goods. They induce the sign of an agent to trade with, while at the same time, they induce a sign to display. The signs come to mean sets of behaviors, or roles, through this double induction. A system of roles emerges, holding the knowledge of social coordination needed to distribute tasks among the agents.

Keywords: Agent-Based Model; Computational Social Theory; Economics Simulation; Symbolic Interactionism; Emergent Language; Sociological Roles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-01-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/1/1.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jas:jasssj:2004-28-2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Renzini ().