An unintended consequence of low cost maritime travel may be hyperconnectedness, creating social situations where information can be readily passed before it is verified- an issue not limited to modern digitally connected societies. In traditional Coast Salish societies, the peoples of what is now Western Washington and Southwestern British Columbia, oral traditions were vertified through a process called witnessing. Witnesses would be trained to recount and verify oral history and traditional teachings at high fidelity. Here, a simple model based on dual inheritance approaches to genes and culture, is used to compare this specific form of verifying socially important information compared to modern mass communication. The model suggests that witnessing is a high fidelity form of transmitting knowledge with a low error rate, more in line with modern apprenticeships than mass communication. Social mechanisms such as witnessing provide solutions to issues faced in contemporary discourse where the validity of information and even fact checking mechanisms may be biased or counterfactual. This effort also demonstrates the utillity of using modeling approaches to highlight how specific, historically contingent institutions such as witnesses can be drawn upon to model potential solutions to contemporary issues solved in the past in traditional Coast Salish practice.

Negotiation plays a fundamental role in shaping human societies, underpinning conflict resolution, institutional design, and economic coordination. This article introduces E³-MAN, a novel multi-agent model for negotiation that integrates individual utility maximization with fairness and institutional legitimacy. Unlike classical approaches grounded solely in game theory, our model incorporates Bayesian opponent modeling, transfer learning from past negotiation domains, and fallback institutional rules to resolve deadlocks. Agents interact in dynamic environments characterized by strategic heterogeneity and asymmetric information, negotiating over multidimensional issues under time constraints. Through extensive simulation experiments, we compare E³-MAN against the Nash bargaining solution and equal-split baselines using key performance metrics: utilitarian efficiency, Nash social welfare, Jain fairness index, Gini coefficient, and institutional compliance. Results show that E³-MAN achieves near-optimal efficiency while significantly improving distributive equity and agreement stability. A legal application simulating multilateral labor arbitration demonstrates that institutional default rules foster more balanced outcomes and increase negotiation success rates from 58% to 98%. By combining computational intelligence with normative constraints, this work contributes to the growing field of socially aware autonomous agents. It offers a virtual laboratory for exploring how simple institutional interventions can enhance justice, cooperation, and robustness in complex socio-legal systems.

This model simulates different spread hypotheses proposed for the introduction of agriculture on the Iberian peninsula. We include three dispersal types: neighborhood, leapfrog, and ideal despotic distribution (IDD).

Signaling chains are a special case of Lewis’ signaling games on networks. In a signaling chain, a sender tries to send a single unit of information to a receiver through a chain of players that do not share a common signaling system.

This model, realized on the NetLogo platform, compares utility levels at home and abroad to simulate agents’ migration and their eventual return. Our model is based on two fundamental individual features, i.e. risk aversion and initial expectation, which characterize the dynamics of different agents according to the evolution of their social contacts.

In an associated paper which focuses on analyzing the structure of several egocentric networks of collective awareness platforms for sustainable innovation (CAPS), this model is developed. It answers the question whether the network structure is determinative for the sustainability of the created awareness. Based on a thorough literature review a model is developed to explain and operationalize the concept of sustainability of a social network in terms of importance, effectiveness and robustness. By developing this agent-based model, the expected outcomes after the dissolution of the CAPS are predicted and compared with the results of a network with the same participants but with different ties. Twitter data from different CAPS is collected and used to feed the simulation. The results show that the structure of the network is of key importance for its sustainability. With this knowledge and the ability to simulate the results after network changes have taken place, CAPS can assess the sustainability of their legacy and actively steer towards a longer lasting potential for social innovation. The retrieved knowledge urges organizations like the European Commission to adopt a more blended approach focusing not only on solving societal issues but on building a community to sustain the initiated development.

The targeted subsidies plan model is based on the economic concept of targeted subsidies.

The targeted subsidies plan model simulates the distribution of subsidies among households in a community over several years. The model assumes that the government allocates a fixed amount of money each year for the purpose of distributing cash subsidies to eligible households. The eligible households are identified by dividing families into 10 groups based on their income, property, and wealth. The subsidy is distributed to the first four groups, with the first group receiving the highest subsidy amount. The model simulates the impact of the subsidy distribution process on the income and property of households in the community over time.

The model simulates a community of 230 households, each with a household income and wealth that follows a power-law distribution. The number of household members is modeled by a normal distribution. The model allocates a fixed amount of money each year for the purpose of distributing cash subsidies among eligible households. The eligible households are identified by dividing families into 10 groups based on their income, property, and wealth. The subsidy is distributed to the first four groups, with the first group receiving the highest subsidy amount.
The model runs for a period of 10 years, with the subsidy distribution process occurring every month. The subsidy received by each household is assumed to be spent, and a small portion may be saved and added to the household’s property. At the end of each year, the grouping of households based on income and assets is redone, and a number of families may be moved from one group to another based on changes in their income and property.
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Reusing existing material stocks in developed built environments can significantly reduce the environmental footprint of the construction and demolition sector. However, material reuse in urban areas presents technical, temporal, and geographical challenges. Although a better understanding of spatial and temporal changes in material stocks could improve city resource management, limited scientific contributions have addressed this challenge.
This study details the steps followed in developing a spatially explicit rule-based simulation of materials stock. The simulation provides a proof of concept by incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of construction and demolition activities to analyse how various urban parameters determine material flows and embodied carbon in urban areas. The model explores the effects of 1) re-using recycled materials, 2) demolitions, 3) renovations and 4) various building typologies.
To showcase the model’s capabilities, the residential building stock of Gothenburg City is used as a case study, and eight building materials are tracked. Environmental impacts (A1-A3) are calculated with embodied carbon factors. The main parameters are explored in a baseline scenario. Then, a second scenario focuses on a hypothetical policy that promotes improvements in building energy performance.
The simulation can be expanded to include more materials and built environment assets and allows for future explorations on, for example, the role of logistics, the implementation of recycling or reuse stations, and, in general, supporting sustainable and circular strategies from the construction sector.

This Agent-Based Model is designed to simulate how similarity-based partner selection (homophily) shapes the formation of co-offending networks and the diffusion of skills within those networks. Its purpose is to isolate and test the effects of offenders’ preference for similar partners on network structure and information flow, under controlled conditions.

In the model, offenders are represented as agents with an individual attribute and a set of skills. At each time step, agents attempt to select partners based on similarity preference. When two agents mutually select each other, they commit a co-offense, forming a tie and exchanging a skill. The model tracks the evolution of network properties (e.g., density, clustering, and tie strength) as well as the spread of skills over time.

This simple and theoretical model does not aim to produce precise empirical predictions but rather to generate insights and test hypotheses about the trade-off between partnership stability and information diffusion. It provides a flexible framework for exploring how changes in partner selection preferences may lead to differences in criminal network dynamics. Although the model was developed to simulate offenders’ interactions, in principle, it could be applied to other social processes involving social learning and skills exchange.

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We construct an agent-based model to investigate and understand the roles of green attachment, engagement in local ecological investment (i.e., greening), and social feedback.