The rapid environmental changes currently underway in many dry regions of the world, and the deep uncertainty about their consequences, underscore a critical challenge for sustainability: how to maintain cooperation that ensures the provision of natural resources when the benefits of cooperating are variable, sometimes uncertain, and often limited. We present an agent-based model that simulates the economic decisions of households to engage, or not, in labor-sharing agreements under different scenarios of water supply, water variability, and socio-environmental risk. We formulate the model to investigate the consequences of environmental variability on the fate of labor-sharing agreements between farmers. The economic decisions were implemented in the framework of prospect theory.

This model is an application of Brantingham’s neutral model to a real landscape with real locations of potential sources. The sources are represented as their sizes during current conditions, and from marine geophysics surveys, and the agent starts at a random location in Mossel Bay Region (MBR) surrounding the Archaeological Pinnacle Point (PP) locality, Western Cape, South Africa. The agent moves at random on the landscape, picks up and discards raw materials based only upon space in toolkit and probability of discard. If the agent happens to encounter the PP locality while moving at random the agent may discard raw materials at it based on the discard probability.

This is a modification of Metaphoria 2019 so that the eternal population is subjected to all the evolutionary forces as the mortal population.

This model is a modification of Metaphoria 2019, where the monetary system can be run with agents that do not die, but their characteristics are mutated as they are in the mortal population.

This is a modification of the RobbyGA model by the Santa Fe Institute (see model Info tab for full information). The basic idea is that the GA has been changed to one where the agents have a set lifetime, anyone can reproduce with anyone, but where there is a user-set amount of ‘starvation’ that kills the agents that have a too low fitness.

This model test the efficiency of the market economy in comparison with a hunter/gatherer economy. It also compares the model outcomes between a market economy when using eternal agents with one using mortal agents.

This model reproduces the double auction experiments and explores the difference between short-term and long-term trading and pricing.

This is the Toy Trader but with two additional goods being traded.

A model that strips trade down to its core to explore foundational emergent behaviour and evolution in trade systems.

An agent-based simulation of a game of basketball. The model implements most components of a standard game of basketball. Additionally, the model allows the user to test for the effect of two separate cognitive biases – the hot-hand effect and a belief in the team’s franchise player.