Suchergebnisse

This paper evaluates a group model‐building project concerning safety in a city neighbourhood. Stakeholders such as inhabitants, housing association managers, and police were directly involved in constructing a system dynamics model of their situation and defining actions to improve safety. Evaluation studies of group model‐building typically assume that participants in modelling sessions share their insights, and in turn, the information exchanged changes their opinions. The modelling project addressed in this paper concerns a messy problem in a public multi‐organizational setting, a situation characterized by ambiguity and conflict. We show that modelling in an ambiguous and conflicted situation helps participants to exchange information and change their opinions on the issue, even when not all conflicts are openly discussed. Group model‐building positively impacts the quality of conclusions reached. The paper ends with a discussion of limitations and areas for future research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractThis paper describes a group model‐building project about new housing construction, urban renewal and the impact of both processes on a regional social housing market. A team of seven stakeholders participated in model construction over a 1‐year period. The paper addresses the modeling process, model analysis and policy experiments. The model yielded several counterintuitive insights, helped the stakeholders to settle a contentious issue and was used in flight simulator workshops with managers and policy makers. By means of questionnaires, we found that most attendants in the project or workshops consider system dynamics modeling as improving communication, insight, alignment and commitment to results. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractSystem dynamics models of organizational problems have been constructed since the 1950s. In the second half of the 1970s publications began appearing on explicit procedures to involve clients in the process of model construction. After about 30 years of applying and researching participative modelling approaches, it is useful to consider the extent to which these procedures have matured into a full‐blown methodology. Does client involvement in system dynamics modelling yield repeatable results? Is the procedure adequately codified, or does its success depend on the experience and skills of the practitioner? Participative modelling is often associated with beneficial process results, such as consensus and participants' commitment to results. What evidence do we have that these 'soft' results actually materialize? Which conditions (types of interventions and client or problem characteristics) are especially favourable to these outcomes? The paper discusses these questions and closes with a set of topics relevant for further development of participative modelling and alternative strategies to study these topics. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the literature, it is assumed that individuals, while performing stock‐flow tasks, often use a correlation heuristic, a form of pattern matching in which they think that the behavior of the stock resembles the (net) flow. To investigate this assumption and to increase our insight in the actual reasoning patterns when performing stock‐flow tasks, we conducted an experiment by using the department store task as baseline. In the treatment condition, participants performed the stock‐flow task while thinking aloud; in the control condition, they only had to write down their answers. The correlation heuristic was corroborated: participants actually did verbalize their thoughts in terms of the biggest difference between inflow and outflow at a particular point, thus expressing the correlation heuristic in words. However, other reasoning strategies that led to incorrect claims were also found. Further research is desirable to elaborate insight in the precursors of heuristic reasoning. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractSimulators and experiments studying dynamic decision making offer a way of finding out about factors enforcing and inhibiting human rationality. This literature review of 51 studies from the system dynamics field helps to identify various factors that influence decision making. The factors are classified into model, simulator and player characteristics. In the paper the effect of these variables on gaming performance is reviewed and synthesized. Model characteristics such as presence of delay and increase of feedback strength seem to lower performance, while changes in exogenous conditions lead to mixed results. With regard to simulator characteristics, the decision interval does not seem to influence performance. Model transparency has a positive relation to performance, similar to decision information (in conjunction with player characteristics). Lastly, with regard to player characteristics, there is some evidence that a long‐term goal increases performance. Although problem‐solving style and mental model characteristics impact performance, no relation between general personality types and performance is found. Also, there are no consistent differences between individuals and pairs with regard to performance. The paper closes with brief comments on future research directions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The purpose of the study is to test whether people make different estimations regarding the consequences of their decisions when a dynamic task is formulated as either a discrete delay or a continuous delay. We test the assumption that people have a tendency to treat continuous delays in real life situations as discrete delays. We created a dynamic task with two different conditions: hiring when personnel stay in an organisation for exactly 10 years (discrete delay condition) or when personnel stay on average for 10 years (continuous delay condition). The task was performed by 79 participants in an experiment. Findings show no differences regarding decisions being made, indicating that participants treat both discrete and continuous delays similarly. Because participants' estimations are substantially closer to the (simulated) system response when a discrete delay is involved, we assume that people have the tendency to treat all types of lags as discrete delays. The results were replicated with two additional experimental tasks that were (i) similar except with respect to task context and (ii) testing the understanding of the two delay types by additional control questions. Research implications are that perception of delay order and understanding consequences of different delay orders play a substantial role for controlling dynamic systems. Practical implications regard making delay order a salient characteristic in decision‐making tasks within organisations, for instance, in human resource management, and the training of managers to understand behavior of dynamic systems based on delay order in that system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.