Agers and non-agers agent compete over a spatial landscape. When two agents occupy the same grid, who will survive is decided by a random draw where chances of survival are proportional to fitness. Agents have offspring each time step who are born at a distance b from the parent agent and the offpring inherits their genetic fitness plus a random term. Genetic fitness decreases with time, representing environmental change but effective non-inheritable fitness can increase as animals learn and get bigger.

Scholars have written extensively about hierarchical international order, on the one hand, and war on the other, but surprisingly little work systematically explores the connection between the two. This disconnect is all the more striking given that empirical studies have found a strong relationship between the two. We provide a generative computational network model that explains hierarchy and war as two elements of a larger recursive process: The threat of war drives the formation of hierarchy, which in turn shapes states’ incentives for war. Grounded in canonical theories of hierarchy and war, the model explains an array of known regularities about hierarchical order and conflict. Surprisingly, we also find that many traditional results of the IR literature—including institutional persistence, balancing behavior, and systemic self-regulation—emerge from the interplay between hierarchy and war.

Violence against women occurs predominantly in the family and domestic context. The COVID-19 pandemic led Brazil to recommend and, at times, impose social distancing, with the partial closure of economic activities, schools, and restrictions on events and public services. Preliminary evidence shows that intense co- existence increases domestic violence, while social distancing measures may have prevented access to public services and networks, information, and help. We propose an agent-based model (ABM), called VIDA, to illustrate and examine multi-causal factors that influence events that generate violence. A central part of the model is the multi-causal stress indicator, created as a probability trigger of domestic violence occurring within the family environment. Two experimental design tests were performed: (a) absence or presence of the deterrence system of domestic violence against women and measures to increase social distancing. VIDA presents comparative results for metropolitan regions and neighbourhoods considered in the experiments. Results suggest that social distancing measures, particularly those encouraging staying at home, may have increased domestic violence against women by about 10%. VIDA suggests further that more populated areas have comparatively fewer cases per hundred thousand women than less populous capitals or rural areas of urban concentrations. This paper contributes to the literature by formalising, to the best of our knowledge, the first model of domestic violence through agent-based modelling, using empirical detailed socioeconomic, demographic, educational, gender, and race data at the intraurban level (census sectors).

What is stable: the large but coordinated change during a diffusion or the small but constant and uncoordinated changes during a dynamic equilibrium? This agent-based model of a diffusion creates output that reveal insights for system stability.

With this model, we investigate resource extraction and labor conditions in the Global South as well as implications for climate change originating from industry emissions in the North. The model serves as a testbed for simulation experiments with evolutionary political economic policies addressing these issues. In the model, heterogeneous agents interact in a self-organizing and endogenously developing economy. The economy contains two distinct regions – an abstract Global South and Global North. There are three interlinked sectors, the consumption good–, capital good–, and resource production sector. Each region contains an independent consumption good sector, with domestic demand for final goods. They produce a fictitious consumption good basket, and sell it to the households in the respective region. The other sectors are only present in one region. The capital good sector is only found in the Global North, meaning capital goods (i.e. machines) are exclusively produced there, but are traded to the foreign as well as the domestic market as an intermediary. For the production of machines, the capital good firms need labor, machines themselves and resources. The resource production sector, on the other hand, is only located in the Global South. Mines extract resources and export them to the capital firms in the North. For the extraction of resources, the mines need labor and machines. In all three sectors, prices, wages, number of workers and physical capital of the firms develop independently throughout the simulation. To test policies, an international institution is introduced sanctioning the polluting extractivist sector in the Global South as well as the emitting industrial capital good producers in the North with the aim of subsidizing innovation reducing environmental and social impacts.

The purpose of the model is to investigate how different factors affect the ability of researchers to reconstruct prehistoric social networks from artifact stylistic similarities, as well as the overall diversity of cultural traits observed in archaeological assemblages. Given that cultural transmission and evolution is affected by multiple interacting phenomena, our model allows to simultaneously explore six sets of factors that may condition how social networks relate to shared culture between individuals and groups:

1. Factors relating to the structure of social groups
2. Factors relating to the cultural traits in question
3. Factors relating to individual learning strategies
4. Factors relating to the environment
   …

The objective of this study is to create a framework to simulate and analyze the effect of multiple business scenarios on the adoption behavior of a group of technology products.

The model explores the emergence of inequality in cognitive and socio-emotional skills at the societal level within and across generations that results from differences in parental investment behavior during childhood and adolescence.

The Regional Security Game is a iterated public goods game with punishement based on based on life sciences work by Boyd et al. (2003 ) and Hintze & Adami (2015 ), with modifications appropriate for an international relations setting. The game models a closed regional system in which states compete over the distribution of common security benefits. Drawing on recent work applying cultural evolutionary paradigms in the social sciences, states learn through imitation of successful strategies rather than making instrumentally rational choices. The model includes the option to fit empirical data to the model, with two case studies included: Europe in 1933 on the verge of war and south-east Asia in 2013.

ABMIND, the Agent-Based Model of Individual Psychological Distance, is a modeling framework developed to examine how psychological distance influences environmental protection behavior in coastal farming communities in southern China. Using household survey data and empirically estimated behavioral pathways, the model represents how uncertainty shapes four dimensions of psychological distance, namely temporal, spatial, social and hypothetical distance, and how these dimensions guide protection and degradation decisions. Agents include households, government actors and mangrove ecosystem patches, connected through social networks and ecological feedbacks that affect learning, expectations and perceived benefits. Policy interventions such as rewards, penalties and publicity guidance efforts work by modifying uncertainty and psychological distance rather than directly controlling behavior. ABMIND is implemented as a spatially explicit model following the ODD protocol, and a concise user guide is provided. In developing ABMIND we introduce a structured validation workflow that links statistical mediation analysis with simulation-based diagnostics, allowing empirical cognitive mechanisms to be systematically embedded and tested within the ABM. This integrated approach strengthens the credibility of psychological-mechanism models and supports their use in policy evaluation. The framework offers a methodological platform for integrating cognitive mechanisms into agent-based environmental behavior modeling and for evaluating policy strategies that support ecosystem protection.
Model paper:
ABMIND: An empirically informed agent-based model of psychological distance and environmental protection behaviour
Ecological Modelling
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2026.111700