Purpose
of this research project in progress is the construction,
empirical validation and experimental application in university
courses, of a web based system for teaching topics of Business
Administration. This system realizes a human cooperative
behavior of human agents (learners) who make decisions in an
interactive way for a simulated organization profit oriented.
Its design is based on System Dynamics and Artificial Agent
modeling (Scholl, 2001). Subsystems represented concerns
acquisition of resources, production of goods and services,
capital investments, research and development expenditure.
External stimuli are responses of markets and supply. According
to the traditional use of the above cited modeling, the design
of a whatever economic system being simulated provides a
discussion of its results “at the end” of
simulation, and the traditional transfer of knowledge suffer of
the paradigm of “coeteris paribus” i.e. its teaching
is concerned on the behavior of given variables keeping the
remaining ones “still”. Conversely in our approach,
the learner (or better the team of learners) during the whole
decision making process, “moves” the whole system
through its overt decisions, “does learn” through
the web interaction and realizes a process of “role
playing” within the group.
This system has a nature of a
“behavior game” where learners are motivated by the
attainment of purposes like profits, a reasonable development
etc. In fact, this game offers a
natural domain for empirical observation of the human agents
dialogue (Airenti, Bara and Colombetti, 1993). Trough
the past experiments (Bussolin,1979) and the present project we
envision a new kind of researches concerning the processes of
transfer of human knowledge in the field of complex economic
systems (Pironti, 2004). This transfer may be realized with
these systems or “interfaces” where the inner
environment is the model and its computer implementation, and
the outer environment is the class of learners molded by the
artifact (Simon,1981). The purpose of this interface may be
viewed as a special case of organizational learning
(Simon,1996).
- Publications 