Marco A. Janssen
Assistant Professor
Associate Director, Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity
Ph.D., Mathematics, Maastricht University, the Netherlands
SHESC Themes: Global Dynamics and Regional Interactions, Societies and their Natural Environments
Field Specializations: Complex Adaptive Systems, Global Change, Human-Environment Interaction, Institutional Analysis, Modeling and Simulation, Quantitative Methods
Regional Focus: International
Contact: Marco A. Janssen, MH 108A
Research:
In 1991, Marco A. Janssen started his research career at the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), where he worked on integrated assessment models of climate change and sustainable development. During his period at RIVM, he wrote his master's thesis on Operations Research (1992), and completed his doctoral thesis on Mathematics (1996). Both theses were focused on methodological issues of integrated modeling. While his master's thesis focused on a rather classical tool—optimization of climate change policies—in his doctoral thesis, he began using tools from complex adaptive systems research like genetic algorithms. Since 1993, he has been mainly interested in the co-evolution of human activities and ecological processes.
In 1998, Janssen moved to the Department of Spatial Economics of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he was a post doc in environmental economics. He also became an active member of the Resilience Network (now Resilience Alliance) and started working on various applications of his thesis work on Australian rangelands and lakes. Janssen also cooperated with psychologists to have a more well-defined formulation of human behavior in his models.
In 2001, he became interested in the evolution of institutional rules and began working with Elinor Ostrom (Indiana University). In 2002, he moved to Indiana University to be a research scientist in the Center of the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, and in 2004 combined that with a visiting assistant professorship in the School of Informatics.
Janssen's current interests focus on the following question: How can robust interactions between social agents and their environment evolve or be designed? He is interested in understanding how ecological dynamics, institutional arrangements and human decision-making characteristics affect how human activities fit with the environment. He uses case study analysis, human subject experiments and computational models to understand specific puzzles. Application areas include Australian rangelands, irrigation, foraging of hominids, public good and common pool resource experiments.
Research Projects:
Dynamics of Rules in Commons Dilemmas
Integrated Analysis of Robustness in Dynamic Social Ecological Systems
Integrating Socio-Ecological Sciences Through a Community Modeling Framework
Teaching:
Janssen's teaching covers the use of computer simulation, especially system dynamics and agent-based modeling, within the social sciences, for both graduate and undergraduate levels. The goal of these courses is to learn the basic principles of social simulation, and applying this to questions of emergence of cooperation, innovation diffusion and foraging patterns. Janssen is also a member of doctoral committees of students in a variety of disciplines.
Select Publications:
Janssen, M. A. & Anderies, J. M. (2007). Robustness-tradeoffs for social-ecological systems, International Journal of the Commons, 1(1), 77-99.
Ostrom, E., Janssen, M. A. & Anderies, J. M. (2007). Going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104: 15176-15217.
Janssen, M.A. (2006). Historical institutional analysis of social-ecological systems. Journal of Institutional Economics, 2(2).
Bergh, J. C., van den, J. M. & Janssen, M. A. (Eds.) (2004). Economics of industrial ecology: Materials use and spatial scales. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Janssen, M. A. (Ed.) (2002). Complexity and ecosystem management: The theory and practice of multi-agent systems. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishers.
