Social Complexity of Informal Value Exchange

A workshop on the

Social Complexity of Informal Value Exchange
SCIVE 2010

Exploring the social aspects of informal value transfer
at the European Complex Systems Society Conference,
Lisbon, September 16^th, 2010

Guest Speakers:

Roger Ballard the Director of the Centre for Applied South Asian Studies will talk on the Informal Hawala/Hundi Systems of Value Transfer

Rosaria Conte the Director of the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation at ISTC/CNR, Rome will talk on Social Dynamics and ICT

Mats Eriksson from Ripple will talk on Towards P2P money - Ripple and beyond

The Topic

This workshop aims to promote inquiry into social phenomena that involve value-exchange, and in particular on systems for credit and value transfer that do not rely on contract or centralised record keeping. Examples include: local baby-sitting circles, informal lending of books among friends, generalised exchange and the Hawala/Hundi systems of money transfer.

Informal value transfer and credit networks involve people or institutions providing credit or value transfer services based on social trust rather than laws and contracts. Such networks constitute a complex system that have been relatively unmodelled yet have a significant impact on people's lives (antrhropologists have studied them for a long time). ICT advances – for example the reduction of social distance and the advent of economically-feasible micro transactions – allow for significant improvements in reach and quality of these networks and might allow the release of presently untapped social resources.

We aim to contribute to understanding and to change in networks for credit and value transfer by individual based simulation. Many aspects of human cooperation involve some exchange of value and are the traditional subject matter of the field of economics. However this exchange often involves many social processes and mechanisms other than those usually considered by economists, including: social norms, altruism, reputation, trust, group membership, friendship, kinship, identity, status etc. These can only be understood by modelling them at the individual level (with possible analytic models later), using techniques such as agent-based simulation to take into account their social complexity.

The above artefacts are going to play an ever more important role thanks to the removal of barriers and to individual empowerment allowed by the growth of communication networks. As a consequence, the conversion of the above processes and mechanisms to their monetary value could grow more and more difficult, and the financial institutions that move and manage money could get reshaped. Two contrasting forces are at work here. On one hand, the ease with which value and credit can be transferred worldwide favours large, powerful organizations, whose aims grow less and less related to the territory. On the other hand, individuals can exert a stronger control on their own (small-scale) resources, creating a potential for peer finance, where mental constructs can play a very important role. We already see the effects of this second force in the rise of micro business and micro finance.

This workshop invites contributions of individual-based models of these aspects of society that involve value exchange or coordination. The economic processes of price, supply/demand and varieties of economic rationality (e.g. bounded rationality, optimisation etc.) are relatively well studied – this workshop aims to concentrate on the other social aspects involved.

News

News pertaining to this workshop and associated events and initiatives will be posted at http://scive.blogspot.com

Workshop Programme

This will be a one-day meeting, including invited speakers, submitted papers and discussion. It will take place during ECCS - the European Conference on Complex Systems at Lisbon, on the 16^th September 2010.

9:00 - 10:00
Roger Ballard, Informal Hawala/Hundi Systems of Value Transfer (Invited speaker)

10:00 - 10:30 Coffee-break

10:30 - 12:30
Anamaria Berea, Network Externalities in Hawala Exchanges
Bruce Edmonds, Obligation, trust and information in an Agent-Based Model of the Hawala System of International Value Exchange
Sarah Wolf, Antoine Mandel, Steffen Furst, and Carlo Jaeger, Prices as conventions in an agent based model of growing economies

12:30 - 14:00 lunch, posters and demos

14:00 - 16:00
Rosaria Conte, Social Dynamics and ICT (Invited Speaker)
Victorien Barbet, Renaud Bourles, and Juliette Rouchier, Evolving informal cooperatives for a risky activity when networks matter
Mario Paolucci, Emergence of Money on a Network Topology
David Hales, Towards a Financial Commons?

16:00 - 16:30 coffee-break

16:30 - 18:30
Mats Eriksson, (Ripple.com), Towards P2P money - Ripple and beyond. (Invited Speaker, provisional title)
Discussion - future directions, events, initiatiatives, networks and maybe even grant applications

Publication

Future plans, including publication of new/revised papers will be discussed at the end of the workshop. We have an "in principle" agreement from the editor of Real-World Economics Review to publish a selection of revised papers resulting from workshop in a special section there (depending on their quality and appropriateness), so that is a real possibility.

Dates

July 31, 2010 – Last day before late registration rate starts
Sept 13, 2010 – First day of ECCS conference
Sept 16, 2010 – The Workshop
Sept 17, 2010 – Last day of ECCS conference

Registration

Those attending must register for the ECCS 2010 conference. The information about this is on the conference website: http://eccs2010.eu. Note that the highest rate applies for registrations from August 1st and after.

Bursuries

SCIVE has received some support from ASSYST and from ESSA for this event. Thus we are in the position to offer some bursaries for PhD students and maybe others who have a full paper accepted for SCIVE to attend! Details will be posted here and on the blog when we know them.

There are slso some ASSYST bursaries available for women and under-represented minorities to attend ECCS, including SCIVE 2010, see page at: http://eccs2010.eu/node/29 for full conditions and procedure.

Organising Comittee

Bruce Edmonds (UK), is a Senior Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School and Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling. He was the scientific chair of the 2009 ESSA conference, and is on the council of the CSS. He is currently editing a “Handbook on Simulating Social Complexity” for Springer. He has been on the PC and organising committees of far too many workshops and conferences to list. His publications are at http://bruce.edmonds.name/pubs.html
David Hales (Netherlands) is a researcher at the Technical University of Delft. He has been involved in the organisation of a number of workshops and conferences centred around complexity / agent-based modelling including MABS 2003, M2M 2003, CSS-TW1 (2006) and SASO 2007. He has been involved with previous ECCS conferences in various capacities and is currently a member of the Complex Systems Society and the European Social Simulation Association. His publications can be found at: http://davidhales.com
Mario Paolucci (Italy) is a researcher at the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation, ISTC-CNR. He has coordinated the eRep "Social Knowledge for e-Governance" project under EU FP6. He is a member of several program committees, including AAMAS 2009 (Senior PC member), The 3rd International Conference on Complex Distributed Systems (CODS 2009), and ACM SAC session on trust/reputation. He has chaired the RASTA '02 and RASTA '03 workshops, the RAS '04 workshop, and the MABS 2007 workshop. His page is at: http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=2
Juliette Rouchier (France) is a researcher at GREQAM (Groupement de Recherche en Economie Aix-Marseille). She was organiser of the First World Conference for Social Simulation and of two Model to Model workshops (relating Agent-based modelling to other types of models) and is PC member of many workshops and conference. She has worked on trust formation in groups for the last 10 years. Her publications can be found at: http://www.vcharite.univ-mrs.fr/PP/rouchier/publications.html

The Programme Comittee

(Chair) Dr. Bruce Edmonds (Centre for Policy Modelling, MMU, UK)

Dr. David Hales (Delft, Netherlands)

Dr. Mario Paolucci, (ISTC/CNR Rome, Italy)

Dr. Juliette Rouchier, (Greqam/CNRS, France)

Prof. Domenico Parisi (ISTC-CNR, Rome)

Dr. Edoardo Mollona (Univ. of Bologna)

Dr. Edmund Chattoe, (Univeristy of Leicester, UK)

Dr. Luis Izquierdo (European University Institute, Italy)

Dr. Frederic Amblard, (University of Toulouse 1, France)

Dr. Luis Antunes, (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Dr. Rosaria Conte, (ISTC/CNR Rome, Italy)

Prof. Wander Jager, (University of Groningen, Netherlands)

Dr. Segismundo Izquierdo (University of Valladolid, Spain)

Dr. Gary Polhill (Macaulay Institute, Scotland)

Contact

If you have any queries about the workshop email bruce@edmonds.name