Thank you, John. I think system dynamics is the modeling method of choice for social systems, and there is a long list of such models, i believe, including the names you mentioned, below.

And to state what i think you already know, one can buy a large system dynamics bibliography for USD25 from
http://www.systemdynamics.org/biblio/sdbib.html
And on that page there is a pointer to additional bibliographae for free.

My work has a short list of system dynamics models in it and is available at
http://www.Master-Systems.com/Parsons.ivnu

I used discrete event simulation, for which there are even fewer examples! Hanneman was on my dissertation committee, one of the advantages of our field: some of the pioneers are still around!

Let me know how to help. - Stan

John Cody wrote:
Stan,

I was very interested in your response. From my point of view Jacobsen is
one of a very small number of sociologists who use system dynamics
modelling. (With Hanneman, and perhaps Phillips, that just about covers the
field.)

I have two questions:

1. Do you agree with my statement above?

2. Has your work on Parsons been published in a form that is accessible
online?

Pse reply through the list if you think these questions are of wider
interest.

Regards,

John Cody

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stan Rifkin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 9:59 AM
Subject: Re: Newbie on the list - working on emergence of norms and beliefs

  
Well, the authority i use on modeling norms is:
Jacobsen, C., & Bronson, R. (1985). Simulating violators.  Operations
Research Society of America [now Institute for Operations Research and
Management Science].
when i am not using any of Talcott Parsons' many, many works that
describe his theory of action and how action depends upon norms and is
in reference to them.

Hope this helps. Best of success. - Stan Rifkin

Rui Lopes wrote:

    
Hi!,

My name is Rui Lopes and I'm a M.Sc Student of Computer Science in the
University of Coimbra. I am working in ECoS, CISUC
(http://cisuc.dei.uc.pt/ecos/) for one year and hale, ina  project on
Models of Territorial Self-organisation - MATer
(http://cisuc.dei.uc.pt/ecos/view_project.php?id_p=54). Now I am also
working on my dissertation on the Emergence and Propagation of Norms
and Beliefs and recently I have joined this list. The aim of
dissertation is to "upgrade" the simulation that results from MATer
with agents that recognize and reason about beliefs and norms to study
the emergence of norms and beliefs and how those propagate in real
world territories.
After some research I am decided to build BDI based agents. MATer uses
Repast and I'm thinking in use Jason or Jadex for the reasoning of the
agents. I have also looked at others like 3APL, Jess, etc but they
seem less appropriate.
I have read on several frameworks for modeling norms and beliefs, but
most of them are only theoretical models. I didn't understand quite
well if modal or deontic logic are an obligation in such a system and
if there are proper tools to embed this kind of reasoning into a
toolkit like repast.
I would appreciate some counseling on the toolkits/languages to use on
my simulation as also as references and readings on implemented models
of norms and beliefs.

Thank you very much in advance,
Rui Lopes