The model’s purpose is to provide a potential explanation for the emergence, sustenance and decline of unpopular norms based on pluralistic ignorance on a social network.

We model the epistemic dynamics preceding political uprising. Before deciding whether to start protests, agents need to estimate the amount of discontent with the regime. This model simulates the dynamics of group knowledge about general discontent.

Transhumants move their herds based on strategies simultaneously considering several environmental and socio-economic factors. There is no agreement on the influence of each factor in these strategies. In addition, there is a discussion about the social aspect of transhumance and how to manage pastoral space. In this context, agent-based modeling can analyze herd movements according to the strategy based on factors favored by the transhumant. This article presents a reductionist agent-based model that simulates herd movements based on a single factor. Model simulations based on algorithms to formalize the behavioral dynamics of transhumants through their strategies. The model results establish that vegetation, water outlets and the socio-economic network of transhumants have a significant temporal impact on transhumance. Water outlets and the socio-economic network have a significant spatial impact. The significant impact of the socio-economic factor demonstrates the social dimension of Sahelian transhumance. Veterinarians and markets have an insignificant spatio-temporal impact. To manage pastoral space, water outlets should be at least 15 km
from each other. The construction of veterinary centers, markets and the securitization of transhumance should be carried out close to villages and rangelands.

Fertility Tradeoffs is a NetLogo model that illustrates the emergencent tradeoffs between the quality and quantity of offspring. Often, we associate high fitness with maximizing the number of offspring. However, under certain circumstances, it pays instead to optimize the number of offspring, having fewer offspring than is possible. When the number of offspring is reduced, more energy can be invested in each offspring, which can have fitness benefits.

Perpetual Motion Machine - A simple economy that operates at both a biophysical and economic level, and is sustainable. The goal: to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions of sustainability, and the attendant necessary trade-offs.

We present an agent-based model of worker protest informed by Epstein (2002). Workers have varying degrees of grievance depending on the difference between their wage and the average of their neighbors. They protest with probabilities proportional to grievance, but are inhibited by the risk of being arrested – which is determined by the ratio of coercive agents to probable rebels in the local area. We explore the effect of similarity perception on the dynamics of collective behavior. If […]

This is a complex “Data Integration Model”, following a “KIDS” rather than a “KISS” methodology - guided by the available evidence. It looks at the complex mix of social processes that may determine why people vote or not.

The purpose of this model is to examine equity and efficiency in crop production across a system of irrigated farms, as a function of maintenance costs, assessed water fees, and the capacity of farmers to trade water rights among themselves.

What policy measures are effective in redistributing essential resources during crisis situations such as climate change impacts? We model a collective action institution with different rules for designing and organizing it, and make our analysis specific to various societal contexts.

Our model captures a generic societal context of unequal vulnerability and climate change impact in a stylized form. We represent a community of people who harvest and consume an essential resource to maintain their well-being. However, their ability to harvest the resource is not equal; people are characterized by a ‘resource access’ attribute whose values are uniformly distributed from 0 to 1 in the population. A person’s resource access value determines the amount of resource units they are able to harvest, and therefore the welfare levels they are able to attain. People travel to the centralized resource region and derive well-being or welfare, represented as an energy gain, by harvesting and consuming resource units.

The community is subject to a climate change impact event that occurs with a certain periodicity and over a certain duration. The capacity of resource units to regenerate diminishes during the impact events. Unequal capacities to access the essential resource results in unequal vulnerability among people with regards to their ability to maintain a sufficient welfare level, especially during impact events.

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This project combines game theory and genetic algorithms in a simulation model for evolutionary learning and strategic behavior. It is often observed in the real world that strategic scenarios change over time, and deciding agents need to adapt to new information and environmental structures. Yet, game theory models often focus on static games, even for dynamic and temporal analyses. This simulation model introduces a heuristic procedure that enables these changes in strategic scenarios with Genetic Algorithms. Using normalized 2x2 strategic-form games as input, computational agents can interact and make decisions using three pre-defined decision rules: Nash Equilibrium, Hurwicz Rule, and Random. The games then are allowed to change over time as a function of the agent’s behavior through crossover and mutation. As a result, strategic behavior can be modeled in several simulated scenarios, and their impacts and outcomes can be analyzed, potentially transforming conflictual situations into harmony.