Strategic foundation of computational social science

Abstract

For decades, scholars of various disciplines have been fretted over strategic interactions, presenting theoretical insights and empirical observations [3, 18, 25]. Despite the central role played by strategic interactions in creating values in the Internet environment, our ability to understand them scientifically and to manage them in practice has remained limited. While engineering communities suffer from not hav- ing enough theoretical resource to formalize such phenom- ena, economics and social sciences lack adequate technology to properly operationalize their theoretical insights, thereby demanding an integrative solution. This project aims to develop a rational-choice-theory-driven framework for com- putational social science, focusing on social interactions on the Internet. In order to suggest theoretical foundations, validation of the predictions in a controlled environment, and verification of the results in actual platforms, general approaches and a few examples of ongoing research are pre- sented.