Social Interactions in Post-design Phases in Product Development and Consumption: Computational Social Science Modeling - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 151

11.5.2 Treatments
The primary experimental treatments are different rules for the initial set of
Products available for consumption (the 'active set') and the agent's rules for
making changes. For the Producer, the key decision is when to introduce a new
Product from the available alternatives. This depends on their value system—how
much they value 'profitability' (i.e. high performance/cost ratio), how they weigh
the three dimensions of Consumer utility based on consumption history, etc. For
Consumers, the key rule is how quickly or easily they 'make up their mind' about
what product characteristics and utility dimensions they prefer, and how open they
are to change and influence after that. While we will initially experiment with a few
alternatives, eventually we intend to run parameter sweeps across a range of
Product Design Sets and agent value system rules.
For each run of the experiment, we run each of the three experimental settings
with the same initial conditions for the Product Design Set, which includes both an
initial set of Products available for consumption (the 'active set') and the set of
possible new Products covering improvements in performance/cost in one or more
dimensions. Each treatment will be run repeatedly with other initial conditions
randomized. The resulting design trajectories and value system trajectories are
analyzed statistically to identify differences between the three settings.
11.6 Results
We are in the early stages of experimentation and therefore we present preliminary
and illustrative results in this paper.
11.6.1 Setting 1: Producer Acting in Isolation
The following describes illustrative results in the first experimental setting—
Producer acting alone.
The initial 'active set' of products are those that have an initial manufacturing
cost below a fixed threshold, chosen so that it would exclude all but a few products.
Figure 11.4a is a histogram of initial manufacturing costs and Fig. 11.4b is a
histogram from a single run after 3,000 steps. Costs are high initially because the
Producer has no experience and thus faces a cost function that rises with the square
of recipe element values.