eComplexity_DERI:

"Characterising Complexity, the Digital Enterprise, eCommerce Markets and Knowledge Intensive Economies: new analytical approaches from computable economics"

This project is the research element of CISC's participation in DERI, the Digital Enterprise Research Insitute at NUI Galway, funded by Science Foundation Ireland. The main partners in DERI are the Faculty of Engineering, the Department of Information Technology, the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Research Unit (CIMRU) and CISC, all at NUI Galway, and Hewlett Packard, as the key industrial partner.

Background to this project
This section gives an outline of the specific project within the overall DERI programme, which is a collaborative effort between DERI and CISC personnel.
The design and implementation of web ?solutions? are predicated on sometimes implicit understandings of the enterprise ?problems? they are designed to address and the economic contexts in which they are situated. Logically, therefore the successful implementation of these technologies requires systematic attempts to understand the domain of application, and?a particular challenge?to anticipate how that domain may change arising from an innovative (perhaps even ?disruptive?) technology.

A particular challenge is the that deficiencies of extant economic analytical approaches in coherently explaining market behaviour and organisation in traditional resource based economies become acutely apparent in the context of new, highly knowledge-intensive environments, so that the need for new modelling methodologies is evident.On the other hand, there are exiting research opportunities in the intersections between computer science and economics representing by the sub disciplines of agent-based economics, computable economics and experimental economics. In particular, computable economics explores the computability properties of economic phenomena in language which explicitly recognises problems of information processing arising from the massive dimensionality of market decisions, issues assumed away by traditional economic approaches. This workpackage explores these concepts in the particular application of the design of technologies to enable innovation in products, processes and organisations in the digital economy.

Some particular possibilities for exploration, in the context of the economics of semantic web technology are:

the consequences of the increased response to queries which semantic web technology allows, allowing much more efficient analyses of markets for price and other comparisons
increasing dynamism in the formation and ending of demand/supply chains
increased facilitation of entry and exit from markets (partly because switching partners is easier).
In summary, the increased information processing capacity of enterprises in eCommerce markets might be anticipated to dramatically increased the transparency, speed of response, and dynamism of economic transactions, leading to new forms of economic organisation, constituting the virtual enterprise. At the same time, an understanding of how enterprises in the current environment deal with the challenges of supply /demand chain formation, price comparisons and market analyses and the innovation process form vital ingredients in informing the design of emerging semantic web technologies.

Project Leader:

Participants:

Tasks within this project (workpackage no 17 within the DERI programme)
T17.1 Survey, in the context of semantic web technology enabled economies of the domain of application and existing approaches i.e., consideration of levels of analysis: macro-economic, industry level, enterprise level, individual economic agents; and consideration of traditional neo-classical approaches, evolutionary, bounded rationality and satisfying approaches.
T17.2 Assessment of limitations of extant approaches and analytical opportunities from computable economics, agent-based economics and experimental economics in the light of emerging technological specifications of the semantic web.

T17.3 Development of formalisms to encapsulate the idea of boundedly rational semantic economic agents to populated eCommerce markets.

T17.4 Development of formalisms to study the disequilibrium dynamics of eCommerce markets subject to rapid technological change and innovation, populated by boundedly rational semantic economic agents, perhaps as Complex Adaptive Communication Networks.

T17.5 Exploration the consequences of these analytical approaches for the design, implementation and adoption of semantic web technologies in respect particularly of supply change management and formation of virtual enterprises/the development of inter-organisational systems

T17.6 Application of formalisms to the characterisation of innovation processes in digital enterprises in the knowledge based economies; reformulations/extensions of modelling approaches for this particular domain of application.

T17.7 Exploration of computable approaches to the locational aspects of knowledge intensive economic activity.

T17.8 Exploration of the application of new modelling approaches to the framing of policy interventions in the digital economy

Publications, presentations etc, for this project:

Journal articles:

Velupillai, V., Review of S.N. Afriat,"The Market: Equilibrium, Stability, Mythology" Zeitschrift fur Natinalokonomie, 2003