Welcome to Navid Ghaffarzadegan Homepage

I am a PhD student in Public Administration and Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. I am from Iran, and I have been in the US since fall 2006 with my sweet wife, Niyousha. I got my BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 and my Master in Business Administration in 2005, both, from Sharif University of Technology , Iran, Tehran. My research area is Decision and Policy Sciences. I am interested in behavioral decision making, individual and group learning, and their applications in Public Policy and Strategy. I have worked with John Rohrbaugh and Tom Stewart in this area of research. I have also been trained in system dynamics. I am interested in using this method, in addition to regression models, to analyze social systems. I have learned system dynamics in Iran from Ali Mashayekhi, and, now, studying at Albany gives me the opportunity to learn more about it form my great professors George Richardson and David Andersen. I have received scholarship from the System Dynamics Society for 2006-2009.

Current Reseacrh

Organizational Behavior, Decision Science and Learning

Navid Ghaffarzadegan, Thomas Stewart, 2009, Modeling the Effects of Conditional Feedback on Learning, Working paper

This study is about decsion making in a series of tasks with outcome feedback. For many selection and detection problems the availability of feedback may be conditional on the decision made. For example, in passenger screening for airline security, security officers receive no feedback about the passengers who are not selected for searching. In this paper, we use simulation to investigate how such “conditional feedback” affects decisions. First, based on detection theory, a model of threshold learning is proposed and used to examine conditional feedback situations. Simulation results show the model is able to replicate two results in threshold learning: conservative threshold placement in full feedback and threshold overestimation in conditional feedback. Simulation Model in Vensim.

The first draft of this paper which was more focused on underestanding the effect of conditional feedback on learning and using a system dynamics model was presented in the International System Dynamics Conference, Athens 2008. The draft received the Barry Richmond Scholarship Award and Honorable Mention in Dana Meadows Student Paper Award.

Public Management and Policy

Navid Ghaffarzadegan, 2008, How a System Backfires: Dynamics of Redundancy Solution in Security, Risk Analysis 28(6): 1669 - 1687.
ISI Journal Ranking: 10/65 (Mathematics, Interdisciplinary Applications); 5/31 (Social Sciences, Mathematical Methods) - Impact factor = 1.93

This paper elaborates Scott Sagan's hypotheses about effects on redundancy on security. I simulate and analyze a simple and generic security system as more guards are added to the system. Simulation results support two of Sagan's hypotheses and make us question the importance of the initial power of adversaries as the results show that, for any exogenous level of adversary power, the system endogenously overcompensates to a level that makes the system more susceptible to being attacked.Simulation Model in Vensim.

The first versions of this paper were presented in the International System Dynamics Conference, Boston 2007 and NAACSOS Conference, Atlanta 2007.

Navid Ghaffarzadegan, Amir T. Tajrishi. 2008. Economic Transition Management in the Iranian Cement Industry, Revise & Resubmit in System Dynamics Review

This paper represents recommended policies for the Iranian Cement Industry which will deal with an economic transition to market economy. Building on commodity model literature, we develop a cement price model and tailor it for testing different economic transition policies. In the base run, we predict a huge overshoot in Iran’s cement price before reaching its long term equilibrium state. Experimenting with the model, we suggest a specific transition policy which starts from drastic rise(s) in price before leaving the price up to the market. Simulation Model in Vensim.

The first version of this paper was presented in the International System Dynamics Conference, Boston 2007.

Other Papers are listed in the CV

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Last updated: Jan 14, 09 by ng