The HealthBound game (available online at http://www.cdc.gov/HealthBound) was developed in 2008-09 under the auspices of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and was described in a plenary talk at ISDC 2009 in Albuquerque. The underlying SD model is the most integrative tool available anywhere for national health policy analysis, and presents the challenge of balancing different types of policies in order to effectively improve population health, lower costs, and achieve greater equity. This workshop starts with introduction to the model and the game, followed by an extended opportunity for small teams to experiment and play the game at their laptops, and concluding with discussion of results and their implications.
Dental caries in primary teeth of children 5 years of age or younger is one of the major health problems in the United States, especially for low-income children. This paper presents a framework for assessing the impact of various programs designed to reduce the prevalence and consequences of Early Childhood Caries. The paper describes a System Dynamics simulation model of the population of children 0-5 years old in Colorado. Results of simulations with a number of individual interventions and combined strategies are presented and program costs and savings in treatment costs are compared.
The economy is studied at all scales, from micro to macro. With global trends toward rapid urbanization, one abstracted scale of the economy will become increasingly important to understand, that of a city economy. Working in close cooperation with the urban planning staff of a US city, the authors developed a system dynamics model of a city as a complex, adaptive, system of system. The economy sector of the model is distinguished by its incorporation of the citys highly porous boundaries and unification of multiple definitional approaches to the key measure of City Gross Domestic Product. The result is a system thinking tool for policy makers to explore the relationships between citywide, policy-initiated changes and the structurally determined performance of the city economy.
The purpose of the paper is to test whether people make different decisions when a task requires either a fixed delay or a continuous delay conceptualisation. With the help of a structurally simple dynamic decision making task, we test two conditions in a controlled experiment: hiring when personnel stays in an organisation for exactly ten years (fixed delay condition) or when personnel stays on average for ten years (continuous delay condition). In this preliminary study, 71 participants were tested. Findings so far show no differences in performance between the groups, indicating that they most likely use the same cognitive representation of the task. Since participants answers are substantially closer to the fixed delay condition, we assume that people have the tendency to conceptualise lags in the form of discrete delays, at least in the context of personnel hiring. Research implications comprise the repetition of the experiment to achieve a higher number of participants and to allow for a more extreme differentiation between the two conditions. Practical implications regard the formulation of decision making tasks within organisations, for instance in human resource management. The value of this paper lies in its rigorous usage of a structurally simple dynamic task to shed light on a fundamental trait of human decision making.