Analysis of Complex Systems: An Experiment and Its Implications for Policymaking,
Abstract
The paper was written as an integrative chapter for a larger collected work that concentrates on and details many of the special and undesirable aspects of large, hard-to-understand and manage systems. Discussed and interrelated are several relevant theoretical areas of inquiry, including scholarship from political science, psychology, organizational behavior, and communications. Informed and guided by the thinking in these diverse areas, a small illustrative experiment was designed and operated to examine the effects of increasing a representative system's analytic size, the connectedness of its elements, and the degree of its temporal and spatial detail. Implications of the experiment are discussed. The central question of operational control, given conflicting interpretations of an operational reality, externalities generated in a context, and periods of high stress decisionmaking, is then related to the ideas generated by the experiment and to the pragmatic and theoretical concerns that formed the basis of the investigation. (Modified author abstract)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1973
- Accession Number
- AD0764643
Entities
People
- Garry D. Brewer
Organizations
- RAND Corporation