Another Place

While it's not likely I'll update this with a legitimate update again any time soon, I now have a home page briefly describing my research here.

Just noting this here for completeness. :)

An Explanation

It has been pointed out to me that one really oughtn't to post about one's actual reseach in the public domain so I haven't really been updating for a while. Once I settle down to figuring out exactly what that research is, then I shall go back to posting about other topical but non-secret things. Perhaps.

Social networking as a business tool

The blog update for today from Many-to-Many caught my eye as it posts the strategy description from the front page of Socialtext, which describes the way a business should convince employees to use the wiki setup that Socialtext sells.

Basically what it boils down to is: you won't convince everyone to use it, but if you can convince just a small core of users to do nearly all of the work on it, then you'll be successful in implementing such a business wiki (and it will boost productivity a billion percent etc etc buy our product etc etc).

This supernode idea is exactly why nearly all the social networking programs work, and it's perhaps not surprising given that it's how most social organisation works outside of the online environment as well. I offer no specific evidence of this, but I'm sure someone must have done studies on this. Is the key to success not to encourage everyone to cooperate but to encourage a specific few to cooperate far more than their fair share?

In a loosely cooperative agent community where a (decentralised?) reputation system is in place (but where a tragedy of the commons is possible because the things that need doing require a small cost to cooperate with but are a public good) maybe being a supernode can be encouraged by the fact that as a supernode in a given task the agent becomes a supernode in the network with associated benefits from a good reputation. In which problem domain is this the case?

The other suggestion from Phil Kilby just earlier based on this kind of concept was that a way to encourage supernodes might be for the supernode agents to convince the agents in the second-tier of cooperation to cooperate further and so on instead of pushing the least cooperative agents to become slightly cooperative.

Slightly less relevant stuff

This research is taking me places I never thought I'd go.

Today that meant the "IT business" section of The Australian as well as the other sections. It was somewhat intriguing to note that the suggestions of changing economy I mentioned just previously were more or less agreed with by the articles there - the way businesses are changing thier structure, and the rise of social networking companies, etc. This may also be coloured by previously listening to the Value Networks lecture given by Verna Allee as a podcast from a Berkeley course, on similar topics.

Another article I spotted was about quantum computers calculating the solution to problems without actually running at all. This was somewhat intriguing but sort of made sense given a very slight background learning about such things. On returning to my office I found this post over at Shtetl-Optimized, which explained it much more convincingly.

Some thoughts on group selection

Rather than the usual pseudo paper review, I have some thoughts written during an otherwise uninspiring talk that ran overtime by 30 mins.

Group selection is a highly useful concept which makes a lot of evolutionary sense. In this way groups with cooperative tendencies can outcompete groups with a tendency to defect. While the individual group member isn't doing the optimal thing, the group as a whole performs much better.

One thing I feel is vital in an agent society is that agents should be able to change their groups and their behaviour as they (or their creator/potential human controller) see fit.

Tags as described in some earlier entries create implicit group selection, where groups are not explicitly formed but come about by the agents effectively distrusting anyone with sufficiently different "genes". Maybe looking at explicit group selection would be a good idea as an agent trying to cheat can probably abuse such an implicit group selection criteria if they want to anyway.

One reason I like the idea of group selection is that everyone wants groups to exist. Cooperators want groups to exist so that they can prosper peacefully with other cooperators and try to keep the defectors out. Defectors want groups so that they can try to invade the groups - without groups or some similar notion everyone will end up defecting, which nobody ever wants. So this is something that should be a popular choice for everyone. I have ignored any other "impure" strategy here, for completeness something more should be discussed.

An important question I need to ask is if there are other theories which compete with group selection. I have a feeling there is because from at least earlier papers/books on the topic of group selection it sounds like it's deemed to be a controversial view. Note to self is to look this sort of thing up more thoroughly.

There are some problems I have with group selection though, before discussing its value or implementation in different arenas any further. One problem is that in many cases it just doesn't matter whether everyone cooperates, so there isn't a strong need for this. An example given in Beenen et al 2004 (though they cite earlier sources for each figure) is that of the Gnutella file sharing network, where 10% of users share 87% of the files, while 2/3 of users don't share any files. Yet it is still considered successful for all concerned, if the freeloaders were driven off it would be far less successful at achieving its goals, in my opinion. The freeloaders don't intend to share files regardless, for reasons external to benefits gained from the network. The work on group selection in this area by Hales 2004 might still be effective though, despite the holes I mentioned previously.

In other cases, group selection isn't such a great idea because the whole point of the system is that everyone is contributing to a whole, and it's the number of participants that makes the system work. Moving to a group based selection would somewhat devalue the usefulness of the system, potentially. In this category I put such systems as eBay or recommender sites that use social networking to get reviews and data on every movie ever made or similar. Here cooperation is very imporgant, but so is participation and everyone being available as a potential trading partner. Reputation based systems for keeping defectors at bay seem more applicable in these areas.

Where does that leave group selection in my mind as a motivator for good behaviour in an agent society? It's probably most useful in a situation where there's competition for resources - the kinds of situations where an evolutionary model makes the most sense in the first place, I suppose.


Gerard Beenen, Kimberly Ling, Xiaoqing Wang, Klarissa Chang, Dan Frankowski, Paul Resnick, Robert E. Kraut - Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities
Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

David Hales - From Selfish Nodes to Cooperative Networks - Emergent Link-based incentives in Peer-to-Peer Networks
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, 2004

Economics and Agent Society

I've been reading a couple of papers which suggest a paradigm shift in business strategy will surely be upon us soon. While these sorts of papers seem more like they're trying to sell copies of the "forthcoming new book" more than anything and are full of buzzwords, something in them resonates with how I think an agent society should be able to operate.

The idea according to Hagel & Brown (2005) is that we are increasingly moving from a "push" model to a "pull" model.

Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs.

If one reads between the economist-speak it sounds like a good idea but without a lot of substance. Some of that substance is filled out in the rest of the paper. The immediate example that came to mind of this transition is the increasing use of "just in time" manufacture whereby manufacturers move away from the old model of making a whole lot of stuff and putting it in warehouses and then trying to sell it, towards producing items only as they are needed (or ideally just before). The point is that they aren't keeping a large inventory on hand, so that if the market changes they can quickly react.

One point stressed by Hagel and Brown is that the reason this works well in practice for some large companies is partly because they have a vast number of subcontractors with different specialties, but also because they do take into account the social factors involved by sticking with the same subcontractors but switching around exactly who manufactures different parts and how they go together according to the needs of a product. Again, the Granovetter paper I mentioned last time is relevant to this.

Internally within companies this idea is being used as well. Within Cisco apparently there's a system whereby the salespeople have training courses relevant to the client they're about to see given to them on a just-in-time basis. The demand here is coming from the client side - they're pulling the employee into learning what they need to know, as opposed to the sales rep turning up and trying to sell whatever they usually sell. It sounds very efficient - for a big business that can afford to have all those training courses sitting around waiting to be used at least.

I think the main point of all this is that consumers do have options now, and businesses are in a position where they can tailor their products and their services far more individually while still on a massive scale. Examples of pull platforms are rife on the Internet - social networking programs are one example. The consumers are also the creators, the business just enables it. Google ads are another example, they aren't very sophisticated, but they're starting to go in that direction by only supplying ads that seem relevant to the viewer based on the page they're already viewing, leading to a much greater "hit rate" than ads that are just globally broadcast to all and sundry.

I think an agent society should certainly incorporate aspects of this. Every agent should be a creator not just work within the system. Quite possibly this means that an OS-agent relays data about the user on the computer it resides on and between the agent society and machine learning type techniques the user gets better service. In a trading arena it's less obvious, but the agents should evolve to form a structure which discourages cheating - as this kind of idea is really "eBay with agents" it's pretty much covered already anyway.

It's pretty much about the end user and tailored service enabled by greater flexibility and communication. There might be some efficiency lost as it's harder to have such a flexible product line (whatever the product is), but there are greater rewards for everyone when it works.

Having written this, the reasons this model should work within an agent society seem obvious - an agent society is already using something like this by definition. Nevertheless, it's still interesting to see this being suggested as a business model not just for the Internet businesses but for manufacturers and all all other businesses as well.


John Hagel, John Seely Brown - From Push to Pull - Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources
Working Paper, 2005

Mark Granovetter - Economic Action and Social Structure: The problem of Embeddedness, 1985

A different version of "Social Capital"

From: Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers
Paul Resnick, 2004

Economic Action and Social Structure: The problem of Embeddedness
Mark Granovetter, 1985

Resnick defines social capital differently to Kanazawa. His definition, taken from Coleman (1988), is that social capital is "productive resources that inhere in social relations". It's not exactly contradictory, but it places the emphasis on general social benefit rather than individual genetic benefit.

Aside from the usual tragedy of the commons that develops without such social capital, there's other examples of social mobilisation given, such as starting a labour strike or the dancing at a party - beneficial for all if everyone does it, but to the detriment of an individual if they're the only one. Further, social relationships can be vital in business and dramatically affect how businesses operate. This is the idea flowing throughout Granovetter's paper, that the situations predicted by classical economic theory don't occur in reality because of the relationships formed between businesses and individuals.

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

The title of the Resnick paper mentions "sociotechnical capital". This refers to "productive resources that inhere in patterns of social relations that are maintained with the support of information and communication technologies". The suggestion is that these can support impersonal social capital, where closer ties are not needed. The benefits include such things as matching systems for geographically disparate users, or behaviour monitoring through reputation systems to weed out defectors.

Resnick mentions that people are increasingly turning to what he alarmingly calls "word of mouse" from strangers as well as recommendations from sources they know. What he doesn't mention is that there is an increasing danger of social manipulation by "shills" who surreptitiously advertise a product as if it was an impartial review. This is already reality, as guerrilla marketing firms employ people to do this - it's along the same lines as "googlebombing" to make your site appear first in a search for a particular type of product (by making a large number of fake websites linking to yours as if it's the best authority on a topic or producer of a product). It's hard to say if these kinds of tactics will erode social trust in social systems. My answer is probably not enough to drag them down entirely, but it deserves a mention. It may be worth a further mention that this kind of tactic has been used outside of the online world as well, although I'm not sure how successfully.

Likewise, news services can be filtered through what the most people read or what the most bloggers are talking about. Apparently in some cities in the US commuters have developed an informal system called "slugging" in which people wanting a lift wait at certain spots and get a lift with people so that they can take advantage of the special lanes for high occupancy vehicles. This benefits everyone except the bus system, even though the system is essentially anonymous. There is personal safety risks with this though, as well as the danger of avocados. Resnick suggests ways in which this system could develop given technology, and the ideas are very impressive - incorporating a review based system (for safety or hygiene reasons) and origin and destination data could lead to a truly efficient semi-public transport system. That still sounds like something that has inherent dangers and discomforts, but it gives an idea of the kinds of potential developments that could occur in the not too distant future with these kinds of technologies and with sufficient social capital. Other examples are given of collective action amongst strangers who share a common goal (such as political activities).

I haven't mentioned much of the paper by Granovetter, and I don't want to go into that one in depth, but I'll just finish this with a somewhat unrelated quote from that paper that may be worth remembering:

The notion that rational choice is derailed by social influences has long discouraged detailed sociological analysis of economic life and led revisionist economists to reform economic theory by focussing on its naive psychology. My claim here is that however naive that psychology may be, this is not where the main difficulty lies - it is rather in the neglect of social structure.

Coleman - Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, American Journal of Sociology, 1988