Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems Engineering

Chapter 7EMERGENCE IN INFORMATION ECONOMIES: AN AGENT-BASED MODELING PERSPECTIVE

Erika Frydenlund¹ and David C. Earnest²

¹Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center, Old Dominion University, Suffolk, VA, 23435, USA

²Department of Political Science, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 57069, USA

INTRODUCTION

We see instances of technological path-dependency all around us. Fossil fuel-based cars have dominated the automobile industry even though electric cars existed in the mid-nineteenth century. Operating systems for personal computers have converged on two choices even though alternative operating systems exist – including free ones. A similar convergence has occurred in software for mobile devices, with the software of two companies constituting 99.6% of the global market for tablets and smart phones operating systems (Moscaritolo, 2017). Even the spelling of words eventually standardized while alternative spellings were dropped. What drives the market to center around one or two main inventions when there are so many possibilities at the outset? How does this convergence happen? Preferential attachment, where certain technologies gain momentum and people are drawn to adopt technologies that already have a number of users, informs a number of insights into network structure. In this chapter, we use the idea of technological lock-ins to demonstrate the value of focusing on the idea of emergence as a primary concept in computational social sciences. Here, we ...