For deep decarbonisation, the design of climate policy needs to account for consumption choices being influenced not only by pricing but also by social learning. This involves changes that pertain to the whole spectrum of consumption, possibly involving shifts in lifestyles. In this regard, it is crucial to consider not just short-term social learning processes but also slower, longer-term, cultural change. Against this background, we analyse the interaction between climate policy and cultural change, focusing on carbon taxation. We extend the notion of “social multiplier” of environmental policy derived in an earlier study to the context of multiple consumer needs while allowing for behavioural spillovers between these, giving rise to a “cultural multiplier”. We develop a model to assess how this cultural multiplier contributes to the effectiveness of carbon taxation. Our results show that the cultural multiplier stimulates greater low-carbon consumption compared to fixed preferences. The model results are of particular relevance for policy acceptance due to the cultural multiplier being most effective at low-carbon tax values, relative to a counter-case of short-term social interactions. Notably, at high carbon tax levels, the distinction between social and cultural multiplier effects diminishes, as the strong price signal drives even resistant individuals toward low-carbon consumption. By varying socio-economic conditions, such as substitutability between low- and high-carbon goods, social network structure, proximity of like-minded individuals and the richness of consumption lifestyles, the model provides insight into how cultural change can be leveraged to induce maximum effectiveness of climate policy.

This is a stylised agent-based model designed to explore the conditions that lead to lock-ins and transitions in agri-food systems.

The model represents interactions between four different types of agents: farmers, consumers, markets, and the state. Farmers and consumers are heterogeneous, and at each time step decide whether to trade with one of two market agents: the conventional or alternative. The state agent provides subsidies to the farmers at each time step.

The key emergent outcome is the fraction of trade in each time step that flows through the alternative market agent. This arises from the distributed decisions of farmer and consumer agents. A “sustainability transition” is defined as a shift in the dominant practices (and associated balance of power) towards the alternative paradigm.

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The Non-Deterministic model of affordable housing Negotiations (NoD-Neg) is designed for generating hypotheses about the possible outcomes of negotiating affordable housing obligations in new developments in England. By outcomes we mean, the probabilities of failing the negotiation and/or the different possibilities of agreement.
The model focuses on two negotiations which are key in the provision of affordable housing. The first is between a developer (DEV) who is submitting a planning application for approval and the relevant Local Planning Authority (LPA) who is responsible for reviewing the application and enforcing the affordable housing obligations. The second negotiation is between the developer and a Registered Social Landlord (RSL) who buys the affordable units from the developer and rents them out. They can negotiate the price of selling the affordable units to the RSL.
The model runs the two negotiations on the same development project several times to enable agents representing stakeholders to apply different negotiation tactics (different agendas and concession-making tactics), hence, explore the different possibilities of outcomes.
The model produces three types of outputs: (i) histograms showing the distribution of the negotiation outcomes in all the simulation runs and the probability of each outcome; (ii) a data file with the exact values shown in the histograms; and (iii) a conversation log detailing the exchange of messages between agents in each simulation run.

This model has been developed together with the publication ‘Modelling Value Change - An Exploratory Approach’

Value change and moral change have increasingly become topics of interest in the philosophical literature. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed. Such accounts are usually based on certain theoretical and conceptual assumptions and their strengths and weaknesses are often hard to determine and compare, also because they are based on limited empirical evidence.

We propose that a step forward can be made with the help of agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM can be used to investigate whether a simulation model based on a specific account of value change can reproduce relevant phenomena. To illustrate this approach, we built a model based on the pragmatist account of value change proposed in van de Poel and Kudina (2022). We show that this model can reproduce four relevant phenomena, namely 1) the inevitability and stability of values, 2) how different societies may react differently to external shocks, 3) moral revolutions, and 4) lock-in.

The goal of the paper is to propose an abstract but formalised model of how Schwartz higher order values may influence individual decisions on sharing an individual effort among alternative economic activities. Subsequently, individual decisions are aggregated into the total (collective) economic output, taking into account interactions between the agents. In particular, we explore the relationship between individual higher order values: Self–Enhancement, Self–Transcendence, Openness to Change, and Conservation – measured according to Schwartz’s universal human values theory – and individual and collective economic performance, by means of a theoretical agent based model. Furthermore, based on empirical observations, Openness to Change (measured by the population average in the case of collective output) is positively associated with individual and collective output. These relations are negative for Conservation. Self-Enhancement is positively associated with individual output but negatively with collective output. In case of Self–Transcendence, this effect is opposite. The model provides the potential explanations, in terms of individual and population differences in: propensity for management, willingness to change, and skills (measured by an educational level) for the empirically observed relations between Schwartz higher order values and individual and collective output. We directly calibrate the micro–level of the model using data from the ninth round of the European Social Survey (ESS9) and present the results of numerical simulations.

The model’s aim is to represent the price dynamics under very simple market conditions, given the values adopted by the user for the model parameters. We suppose the market of a financial asset contains agents on the hypothesis they have zero-intelligence. In each period, a certain amount of agents are randomly selected to participate to the market. Each of these agents decides, in a equiprobable way, between proposing to make a transaction (talk = 1) or not (talk = 0). Again in an equiprobable way, each participating agent decides to speak on the supply (ask) or the demand side (bid) of the market, and proposes a volume of assets, where this number is drawn randomly from a uniform distribution. The granularity depends on various factors, including market conventions, the type of assets or goods being traded, and regulatory requirements. In some markets, high granularity is essential to capture small price movements accurately, while in others, coarser granularity is sufficient due to the nature of the assets or goods being traded

The purpose of the model is to provide an analogy for how the Schwartz values may influence the aggregated economic performance, as measured by: public goods provision, private goods provision and leisure time.

Implementation of Milbrath’s (1965) model of political participation. Individual participation is determined by stimuli from the political environment, interpersonal interaction, as well as individual characteristics.

This is a generic sub-model of animal territory formation. It is meant to be a reusable building block, but not in the plug-and-play sense, as amendments are likely to be needed depending on the species and region. The sub-model comprises a grid of cells, reprenting the landscape. Each cell has a “quality” value, which quantifies the amount of resources provided for a territory owner, for example a tiger. “Quality” could be prey density, shelter, or just space. Animals are located randomly in the landscape and add grid cells to their intial cell until the sum of the quality of all their cells meets their needs. If a potential new cell to be added is owned by another animal, competition takes place. The quality values are static, and the model does not include demography, i.e. mortality, mating, reproduction. Also, movement within a territory is not represented.

This is an extended replication of Abelson’s and Bernstein’s early computer simulation model of community referendum controversies which was originally published in 1963 and often cited, but seldom analysed in detail. This replication is in NetLogo 6.3.0, accompanied with an ODD+D protocol and class and sequence diagrams.

This replication replaces the original scales for attitude position and interest in the referendum issue which were distributed between 0 and 1 with values that are initialised according to a normal distribution with mean 0 and variance 1 to make simulation results easier compatible with scales derived from empirical data collected in surveys such as the European Value Study which often are derived via factor analysis or principal component analysis from the answers to sets of questions.

Another difference is that this model is not only run for Abelson’s and Bernstein’s ten week referendum campaign but for an arbitrary time in order that one can find out whether the distributions of attitude position and interest in the (still one-dimensional) issue stabilise in the long run.