Why the band keeps playing: Strategic interaction in a networked environment

Abstract

The efficiency of complex systems consisting of many autonomous entities is dependent on the ability of these autonomous entities to interact effectively with each other given limited resources. Example sustainable systems subject to both limited resources and such strategic interactions include smart buildings, smart grids, smart cities, and advanced transportation systems. As such, studying the interaction patterns and strategies of people and machines in specific environments can help us understand how to create more effective complex systems. Though resources and communication options among the entities involved in such systems are limited, complex systems offer environments that are strategically very rich and diverse. Such complexities make it difficult to understand and distinguish behavioral strategies without vast amounts of data. As such, most previous work has analyzed and evaluated people's strategies in very isolated situations in which the strategy space is not as rich. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine the effectiveness and impact of specific strategies by observing only isolated aspects of these systems. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, we describe and present a new game, called the Junior High Game, which features repeated personal interactions among a society of people and machines where resources are limited and players have asymmetric capabilities. The game is designed to be strategically and socially engaging so as to encourage people to play it repeatedly and to encourage their friends to play it with them. Second, we conducted a series of user studies from which we observe and evaluate the strategies used by people in this game. Based on these results, we begin to determine the interaction patterns and common strategies that lead to success or failure of individual in networked environments.

Date of Award	Dec 2013
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Jacob Crandall (Supervisor)