Social distancing is a strategy to mitigate the spread of contagious disease, but it bears negative impacts on people’s social well-being, resulting in non-compliance. This paper uses an integrated behavioral simulation model, called HUMAT, to identify a sweet spot
that balances strictness of and obedience to social distancing rules.

A novel agent-based model was developed that aims to explore social interaction while it is constrained by visitor limitations (due to Dutch COVID measures). Specifically, the model aims to capture the interaction between the need for social contact and the support for the visitors measure. The model was developed using the HUMAT integrated framework, which offered a psychological and sociological foundation for the behavior of the agents.

Model implemented in Lammers, W., Pattyn, V., Ferrari, S. et al. Evidence for policy-makers: A matter of timing and certainty?. Policy Sci 57, 171–191 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-024-09526-9

This agent-based model, developed for the study “Online Protest and Repression in Authoritarian Settings,” examines how online protest and repression evolve in authoritarian contexts and how these dynamics affect ordinary users’ attitudes and behavior on social media. The model integrates key theoretical and empirical insights into social media use and core political factors that shape digital contention in authoritarian settings. The following questions are addressed: (1) how online protest–repression dynamics unfold across different levels of authoritarianism and varying compositions of committed accounts, and (2) how ordinary users’ internal propensity to protest and their perceived probability of successful repression change during online protest-repression contestation. The model is evaluated against two empirically grounded macro patterns observed in the real world. The first is enduring protest: online protest becomes dominant as vocal protesters grow to outnumber vocal repressors, shrinking the pool of silent users and stabilizing a pro-protest majority. The second is suppressed protest: online dissent is contained as vocal repression and silence expand in response to protest, yielding a sustained majority of repressive and silent accounts. Together, these dynamics demonstrate how dissenting voices are empowered and suppressed online in authoritarian settings.

Endogenous social transition from a high-corruption state to a low-corruption state, replication of Hammond 2009

Building upon the distance-based Hotelling’s differentiation idea, we describe the behavioral experience of several prototypes of consumers, who walk a hypothetical cognitive path in an attempt to maximize their satisfaction.

This is an agent-based model of the implementation of the self-enforcing agreement in cooperative teams.

Final project version - still needs a bit of work for being completly operational

Agents are linked in a social-network and make decisions on which of 2 types of behavior to adopt. We explore consequences of different information feedback and providing targeted feedback to individuals.

This model is used to simulate the influence of spatially and temporally variable sedimentary processes on the distribution of dated archaeological features in a surface context.

Takács, K. and Squazzoni, F. 2015. High Standards Enhance Inequality in Idealized Labor Markets. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(4), 2, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/18/4/2.html
We built a simple model of an idealized labor market, in which there is no objective difference in average quality between groups and hiring decisions are not biased in favor of any particular group. Our results show that inequality in employment emerges necessarily also in such idealized situations due to the limited supply of high quality individuals and asymmetric information. Inequalities are exacerbated when employers have high standards and keep only the best workers in house. We found that ambitious workers get higher quality jobs even if ambition does not correlate or even negatively correlates with internal quality. Our findings help to corroborate empirical findings on higher employment discrepancies in high rather than low status jobs.