The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In a recent paper, with the help of this very simple agent-based model realized with NetLogo, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

Building upon the distance-based Hotelling’s differentiation idea, we describe the behavioral experience of several prototypes of consumers, who walk a hypothetical cognitive path in an attempt to maximize their satisfaction.

NOMAD is an agent-based model of firm location choice between two aggregate regions (“near” and “off”) under logistics uncertainty. Firms occupy sites characterised by attractiveness and logistics risk, earn a risk-adjusted payoff that depends on regional costs (wages plus congestion) and an individual risk-tolerance trait, and update location choices using aspiration-based satisficing rules with switching frictions. Logistics risk evolves endogenously on occupied sites through a region-specific absorption mechanism (good/bad events that reduce/increase risk), while congestion feeds back into regional costs via regional shares and local crowding. Runs stop endogenously once the near-region share becomes quasi-stable after burn-in, and the model records time series and quasi-stable outcomes such as near/off composition, switching intensity, costs, average risk, and average risk tolerance.

An agent-based model of saving and dissaving behaviour under quasi-hyperbolic (β–δ) discounting. Building on the individual decision problem of Cao and Werning (2018), the model embeds present-biased agents in a Watts–Strogatz small-world network and adds three configurable mechanisms of social influence — information diffusion, peer comparison, and social-norm conformity — across five heterogeneous behavioural profiles (Planners, Moderates, Procrastinators, Inverse Procrastinators, and Impulsive agents).
Each profile’s saving policy is approximated by value-function iteration over a discretised wealth grid; the solved policies are cached and applied as agents interact over their network neighbourhoods. The model tests whether each social mechanism can alter the saving and wealth trajectories that present-biased agents would otherwise follow in isolation, and characterises the direction and size of each effect on median wealth, wealth inequality (Gini), and the incidence of severely depleted agents.
The deposit includes the core model (Model.py), an analysis and visualisation pipeline (analyze_results.py), a standalone ODD description (ODD.md), and pinned dependencies.

A model for simulating farmers and foresters response on changing climate and changing socio-economic parameters. Modeled are changes in land-use as well as in ecosystem services provision.

We provide a full description of the model following the ODD protocol (Grimm et al. 2010) in the attached document. The model is developed in NetLogo 5.0 (Wilenski 1999).

This model is used to simulate the influence of spatially and temporally variable sedimentary processes on the distribution of dated archaeological features in a surface context.

Righi S., Takacs K., Social Closure and the Evolution of Cooperation via Indirect Reciprocity, Resubmitted after Revisions to Scientific Reports

Contains python3 code to replicate the opinion dynamics model from our (so far unpublished) JASSS sumbission “A Balance Model of Opinion Hyperpolarization”. The main function is run_model(), which returns a dictionary object containing various outcome metrics.

This agent-based model (ABM), developed in NetLogo and available on the COMSES repository, simulates a stylized, competitive electricity market to explore the effects of carbon pricing policies under conditions of technological innovation. Unlike traditional models that treat innovation as exogenous, this ABM incorporates endogenous innovation dynamics, allowing clean technology costs to evolve based on cumulative deployment (Wright’s Law) or time (Moore’s Law). Electricity generation companies act as agents, making investment decisions across coal, gas, wind, and solar PV technologies based on expected returns and market conditions. The model evaluates three policy scenarios—No Policy, Emissions Trading System (ETS), and Carbon Tax—within a merit-order market framework. It is partially empirically grounded, using real-world data for technology costs and emissions caps. By capturing emergent system behavior, this model offers a flexible and transparent tool for analyzing the transition to low-carbon electricity systems.