Simulating Information Growth & Diffusion in Agent Societies

The question of how to simultaneously promote growth and diffusion of ideas exhibits difficult yet pressing tradeoffs. To economists, it concerns the relationship between economic health and incentives for sharing information. When does the stimulus to innovation, founded on a profit motive, collide with access to information source material, which exhibits properties of a public good? To the legal profession, it influences what types of ideas should be intellectual property. Is society collectively improved when rights to information are broader or narrower, longer or shorter? To computer scientists, this tension is manifest as a debate in the production of software. Is an open source or proprietary model superior? To policy analysts, growth and diffusion are related to furnishing information access. Are improved communications technologies enough to bring quality information to those who seek it, and if not, why not? Information flow systems depend on a distinctive set of factors including nonrivalry, incentives, agent rationality, topology, random interactions, access, productivity, and environments. Variations among these factors yield a diversity of emergent behaviors. In response to the complexity of practices and policies that explore these factors, we have developed an information growth and diffusion (IGD) simulator (http://si.umich.edu/~mvanalst/iShare). IGD is intended to support research and teaching in three ways: First, software libraries that manage network models will free researchers from starting anew each time a mathematical model is proposed, while speeding the process of inquiry. Second, a simulation environment will help scholars explore robust policies in the context of changes in preferences, technologies, and network structure. Immediate visualization of various propositions is far more effective at conveying new results than static text; standardized simulation will promote faster assimilation of ideas by a broader research community. Finally, tutorials demonstrating known results will be an effective and direct way to help introduce new students to the field. These educational benefits can extend to scholars outside the original reference discipline where an insight is first developed.