Journal on Policy and Complex Systems Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 5

Journal on Policy and Complex Editor’s Systems Letter • Volume 6, Number 1 • Spring 2020
Editor’s Letter
The spring 2020 issue of the Journal of Policy and Complex Systems includes
articles that cover topics ranging from economics and negotiations management
to biomedical innovation and education.
Talebzadehhosseini, Scheinert, and Garibay start the issue by describing the
role of path dependency and structural jumps in green economy expansion. The
green economy is becoming a major component of the overall economic activity
in the world. Analyzing its path to a sustainable development is an important scientific
endeavor. Understanding structural jumps, according to the authors, has an
important role in that process as well.
Shockley continues the economic section of this issue by looking into the
problem of punctuating equilibrium and the missing agency of the policy entrepreneur.
It is an intriguing take on the concept of economic equilibrium and the
transitions between equilibria that happen so often.
S. Kaufman, Koutsovoulou, and M. Kaufman bring up the issue of labor
management negotiations and offer a model and case studies for improved understanding
of our readers. This interdisciplinary work examines the process of
negotiating labor relations. Drawing on social identity theory, the author uses “a
dynamic, multiplex network model to capture interactions between several groups
of labor relations actors.”
Nayar improves modeling human behavior in an economic or social scenario
“by including and combining human personality with the social interactions
aspects.” The author applies this reasoning to the case of pedestrian evacuation
types models and found that “an evacuation model based on personalities can
be built and is able to produce results similar to other previous models as well as
those seen in real life, along with some emergent behaviors.”
Thompson, Gormley, Homan, and Platt present the ”PIC (Prediction, Interaction,
Computation) framework and an accompanying methodology for multiple-criteria
decision making.” They apply this framework to the biomedical innovation
domain.
Barney completes the list of papers by offering a review of the results of the
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act almost twenty years after its implementation.
This review is in the context of considering education as a complex system.
As always, the range of methodological considerations and applications in
this issue of JPCS confirms the growth of this new field emerging at the intersection
of policy and complexity.
We again encourage potential authors to submit their contributions to the
Journal of Policy and Complex Systems, and help us build a discipline that can ad-
1
doi: 10.18278/jpcs.6.1.1