Skip to 0 minutes and 4 seconds When we share something with others, we often encounter problems. When too many people stream videos using a public Wi-Fi, all may suffer from a very bad connection. When we all think it is easier to go by car, everyone will get stuck in traffic. When we keep relying on plastic containers, we all suffer from plastic pollution. How can it be that when we choose what’s best for us, it’s often worse for the common good? And how can we actually protect common goods, such as ecosystems and cooperate better? Within this four-week course, you will explore various problems related to shared resources with the help of different models that illustrate what happens when individual motivations lead to non-optimal social results.
Skip to 1 minute and 0 seconds Throughout the course, you will meet Anna and Ben who struggle to keep their kitchen clean, investigate a story about farmers who struggle and often succeed in preserving their common grazing land, discuss the problem of free riding, and experiment with a group of fishermen who try to use a lake in a sustainable manner. To help you deal with such problems, you will be using a set of simple tools, models, and simulations that are typical for computational social science. It will be a chance to explore the basics of game theory and agent-based models.
Skip to 1 minute and 38 seconds Especially for you and together with an international team of experts, we designed the course in such a way that you don’t need any mathematical or programming skills for that. The world around us is full of challenges related to sharing and cooperating. If you want to better understand those problems and come up with some new solutions, join us.
