Computational Model Library

Displaying 10 of 194 results for "Ingo Wolf" clear search

Peer reviewed Yards

srailsback Emily Minor Soraida Garcia Philip Johnson | Published Thursday, November 02, 2023

This is a model of plant communities in urban and suburban residential neighborhoods. These plant communities are of interest because they provide many benefits to human residents and also provide habitat for wildlife such as birds and pollinators. The model was designed to explore the social factors that create spatial patterns in biodiversity in yards and gardens. In particular, the model was originally developed to determine whether mimicry behaviors–-or neighbors copying each other’s yard design–-could produce observed spatial patterns in vegetation. Plant nurseries and socio-economic constraints were also added to the model as other potential sources of spatial patterns in plant communities.

The idea for the model was inspired by empirical patterns of spatial autocorrelation that have been observed in yard vegetation in Chicago, Illinois (USA), and other cities, where yards that are closer together are more similar than yards that are farther apart. The idea is further supported by literature that shows that people want their yards to fit into their neighborhood. Currently, the yard attribute of interest is the number of plant species, or species richness. Residents compare the richness of their yards to the richness of their neighbors’ yards. If a resident’s yard is too different from their neighbors, the resident will be unhappy and change their yard to make it more similar.

The model outputs information about the diversity and identity of plant species in each yard. This can be analyzed to look for spatial autocorrelation patterns in yard diversity and to explore relationships between mimicry behaviors, yard diversity, and larger scale diversity.

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.

Urban Teacher Lifecycle and Mobility

Yevgeny Patarakin | Published Wednesday, July 23, 2025

This agent-based model simulates the lifecycle, movement, and satisfaction of teachers within an urban educational system composed of multiple universities and schools. Each teacher agent transitions through several possible roles: newcomer, university student, unemployed graduate, and employed teacher. Teachers’ pathways are shaped by spatial configuration, institutional capacities, individual characteristics, and dynamic interactions with schools and universities. Universities are assigned spatial locations with a controllable level of centralization and are characterized by academic ratings, capacity, and alumni records. Schools are distributed throughout the city, each with a limited number of vacancies, hiring requirements, and offered salaries. Teachers apply to universities based on the alignment of their personal academic profiles with institutional ratings, pursue studies, and upon graduation become candidates for employment at schools.
The employment process is driven by a decentralized matching of teacher expectations and school offers, taking into account factors such as salary, proximity, and peer similarity. Teachers’ satisfaction evolves over time, reflecting both institutional characteristics and the composition of their colleagues; low satisfaction may prompt teachers to transfer between schools within their mobility radius. Mortality and teacher attrition further shape workforce dynamics, leading to continuous recruitment of newcomers to maintain a stable population. The model tracks university reputation through the academic performance and number of alumni, and visualizes key metrics including teacher status distribution, school staffing, university alumni counts, and overall satisfaction. This structure enables the exploration of policy interventions, hiring and training strategies, and the impact of spatial and institutional design on the allocation, retention, and happiness of urban educational staff.

Peer reviewed The Andean Resource Management Model (ARMM)

Olga Palacios | Published Tuesday, January 20, 2026

ARMM is a theoretical agent-based model that formalizes Murra’s Theory of Verticality (Murra, 1972) to explore how multi-zonal resource management systems emerge in mountain landscapes. The model identifies the social, political, and economic mechanisms that enable vertical complementarity across ecological gradients.
Built in NetLogo, ARMM employs an abstract 111×111 grid divided into four Andean ecological zones (Altiplano, Highland, Lowland, Coast), each containing up to 18 resource types distributed according to ecological suitability. To test general theoretical principles rather than replicate specific geography, resource locations are randomized at each model initialization.
Settlement agents pursue one of two economic strategies: diversification (seeking resource variety, maximum 2 units per type) or accumulation (maximising total quantity, maximum 30 units). Agents move between adjacent zones through hierarchical decision-making, first attempting peaceful interactions—coexistence (governed by tolerance) and trading (governed by cooperation)—before resorting to conflict (theft or takeover, governed by belligerence).
The model demonstrates that vertical complementarity can emerge through fundamentally different mechanisms: either through autonomous mobility under political decentralization or through state-coordinated redistribution under centralization. Sensitivity analysis reveals that belligerence and economic strategy explain approximately 25% of outcome variance, confirming that structural inequalities between zones result from political-economic organization rather than environmental constraints alone.
As a preliminary theoretical model, ARMM intentionally maintains simplicity to isolate core mechanisms and generate testable hypotheses. This foundational framework will guide future empirically-calibrated versions that incorporate specific archaeological settlement data and geographic features from the Carangas region (Bolivia-Chile border), enabling direct comparison between theoretical predictions and observed historical patterns.

Bargaining with misvaluation

Marcin Czupryna | Published Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Subjective biases and errors systematically affect market equilibria, whether at the population level or in bilateral trading. Here, we consider the possibility that an agent engaged in bilateral trading is mistaken about her own valuation of the good she expects to trade, that has not been explicitly incorporated into the existing bilateral trade literature. Although it may sound paradoxical that a subjective private valuation is something an agent can be mistaken about, as it is up to her to fix it, we consider the case in which that agent, seller or buyer, consciously or not, given the structure of a market, a type of good, and a temporary lack of information, may arrive at an erroneous valuation. The typical context through which this possibility may arise is in relation with so-called experience goods, which are sold while all their intrinsic qualities are still unknown (such as untasted bottled fine wines). We model this “private misvaluation” phenomenon in our study. The agents may also be mistaken about how their exchange counterparties are themselves mistaken. Formally, they attribute a certain margin of error to the other agent, which can differ from the actual way that another agent misvalues the good under consideration. This can constitute the source of a second-order misvaluation. We model different attitudes and situations in which agents face unexpected signals from their counterparties and the manner and extent to which they revise their initial beliefs. We analyse and simulate numerically the consequences of first-order and second-order misvaluation on market equilibria.

Market for Protection

Steven Doubleday | Published Monday, July 01, 2013 | Last modified Monday, August 19, 2013

Simulation to replicate and extend an analytical model (Konrad & Skaperdas, 2010) of the provision of security as a collective good. We simulate bandits preying upon peasants in an anarchy condition.

This is a tool to explore the effects of groups´ spatial segregation on the emergence of opinion polarization. It embeds two opinion formation models: a model of negative (and positive) social influence and a model of persuasive argument exchange.

Cultural Evolution of Sustainable Behaviours: Landscape of Affordances Model

Nikita Strelkovskii Roope Oskari Kaaronen | Published Wednesday, December 04, 2019 | Last modified Wednesday, December 04, 2019

This NetLogo model illustrates the cultural evolution of pro-environmental behaviour patterns. It illustrates how collective behaviour patterns evolve from interactions between agents and agents (in a social network) as well as agents and the affordances (action opportunities provided by the environment) within a niche. More specifically, the cultural evolution of behaviour patterns is understood in this model as a product of:

  1. The landscape of affordances provided by the material environment,
  2. Individual learning and habituation,
  3. Social learning and network structure,
  4. Personal states (such as habits and attitudes), and

Gender differentiation model

Sylvie Huet | Published Monday, April 20, 2020 | Last modified Thursday, April 23, 2020

This is a gender differentiation model in terms of reputations, prestige and self-esteem (presented in the paper https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236840). The model is based on the influence function of the Leviathan model (Deffuant, Carletti, Huet 2013 and Huet and Deffuant 2017) considering two groups.

This agent-based model studies how inequalities can be explained by the difference of open-mindness between two groups of interacting agents. We consider agents having an opinion/esteem about each other and about themselves. During dyadic meetings, agents change their respective opinion about each other and possibly about other agents they gossip about, with a noisy perception of the opinions of their interlocutor. Highly valued agents are more influential in such encounters. We study an heterogeneous population of two different groups: one more open to influence of others, taking less into account their perceived difference of esteem, called L; a second one less prone to it, called S, who designed the credibility they give to others strongly based on how higher or lower valued than themselves they perceive them.

We show that a mixed population always turns in favor to some agents belonging to the group of less open-minded agents S, and harms the other group: (1) the average group self-opinion or reputation of S is always better than the one of L; (2) the higher rank in terms of reputation are more frequently occupied by the S agents while the L agents occupy more the bottom rank; (3) the properties of the dynamics of differentiation between the two groups are similar to the properties of the glass ceiling effect proposed by Cotter et al (2001).

The purpose of this model is to explain the post-disaster recovery of households residing in their own single-family homes and to predict households’ recovery decisions from drivers of recovery. Herein, a household’s recovery decision is repair/reconstruction of its damaged house to the pre-disaster condition, waiting without repair/reconstruction, or selling the house (and relocating). Recovery drivers include financial conditions and functionality of the community that is most important to a household. Financial conditions are evaluated by two categories of variables: costs and resources. Costs include repair/reconstruction costs and rent of another property when the primary house is uninhabitable. Resources comprise the money required to cover the costs of repair/reconstruction and to pay the rent (if required). The repair/reconstruction resources include settlement from the National Flood Insurance (NFI), Housing Assistance provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA-HA), disaster loan offered by the Small Business Administration (SBA loan), a share of household liquid assets, and Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) fund provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Further, household income determines the amount of rent that it can afford. Community conditions are assessed for each household based on the restoration of specific anchors. ASNA indexes (Nejat, Moradi, & Ghosh 2019) are used to identify the category of community anchors that is important to a recovery decision of each household. Accordingly, households are indexed into three classes for each of which recovery of infrastructure, neighbors, or community assets matters most. Further, among similar anchors, those anchors are important to a household that are located in its perceived neighborhood area (Moradi, Nejat, Hu, & Ghosh 2020).

Displaying 10 of 194 results for "Ingo Wolf" clear search

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