A computational model of a classic small group study by Alex Bavelas. This computational model was designed to explore the difficulty in translating a seemingly simple real-world experiment into a computational model.

Due to the role of education in promoting social status and facilitating upward social mobility, individuals and their families spare no effort to pursue better educational opportunities, especially in countries where education is highly competitive.

In China, the enrollment of senior high schools and universities mainly follows a ranking system based on students’ scores in national entrance exams (Zhongkao and Gaokao). Typically, students with higher scores have priority in choosing schools and endeavor to get into better senior high schools to increase their chances of entering a prestigious university.

However, students can only select “better” senior high schools based on their average Gaokao grades, which are strongly influenced by the initial performance (Zhongkao grades) of enrolled students. The true quality indicator of school education (schooling effect, defined as the grade improvement achieved through education at the senior high school) is unknowable. This raises the first question: will school rankings reflect the real educational quality of schools over decades of educational competition, or merely the initial quality of the students they enroll?

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This model explores the coupled dynamics of social norm diffusion and finite resource depletion. Extending the “Affordance Landscape” framework by Kaaronen & Strelkovskii (2020), this simulation investigates how resource scarcity and regeneration rates influence the adoption of pro-environmental behaviours.

The model addresses the gap by linking behavioural norms to a depleting common-pool resource. It tests whether sustainable norms can diffuse rapidly enough to prevent ecological collapse and identifies “tipping points” where resource scarcity acts as a driver for behavioural change.

The purpose of the model is to simulate the cultural hitchhiking hypothesis to explore how neutral cultural traits linked with advantageous traits spread together over time

The HUMan impact on LANDscapes (HUMLAND) model has been developed to track and quantify the intensity of different impacts on landscapes at the continental level. This agent-based model focuses on determining the most influential factors in the transformation of interglacial vegetation with a specific emphasis on burning organized by hunter-gatherers. HUMLAND integrates various spatial datasets as input and target for the agent-based model results. Additionally, the simulation incorporates recently obtained continental-scale estimations of fire return intervals and the speed of vegetation regrowth. The obtained results include maps of possible scenarios of modified landscapes in the past and quantification of the impact of each agent, including climate, humans, megafauna, and natural fires.

This is the model for a paper that is based on a simulation model, programmed in Netlogo, that demonstrates changes in market structure that occur as marginal costs, demand, and barriers to entry change. Students predict and observe market structure changes in terms of number of firms, market concentration, market price and quantity, and average marginal costs, profits, and markups across the market as firms innovate. By adjusting the demand growth and barriers to entry, students can […]

The Simulating Agroforestry Adoption in Rural Indonesia (SAFARI) model aims at exploring the adoption of illipe rubber agroforestry systems by farming households in the case study region in rural Indonesia. Thereby, the ABM simulates the interdependencies of agroforestry systems and local livelihoods, income, land use, biodiversity, and carbon fixation. The model contrasts development paths without agroforestry (business as usual (BAU) scenario), corresponding to a scenario where the government promotes rubber monoculture, with the introduction of illipe rubber agroforestry systems (IRA scenario) as an alternative. It aims to support policy-makers to assess the potential of IRA over larger temporal and spatial scales.

Using nodes from the 2002 General Social Survey sample, the code establishes a network of ties with a given homophily bias, and simulates Internet adoption rates in that network under three conditions: (i) no network externalities, (ii) general network externalities, where an individual’s reservation price is a function of the overall adoption rate in the network, (iii) specific network externalities, where reservation price is a function of the adoption rate in individual’s personal […]

This article presents an agent-based model of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialize in particular phases of fabrics production. It reconstructs the web of communication between firms as they arrange production chains. In turn, production chains result in road traffic between the geographical areas on which the district extends. The reconstructed traffic exhibits a pattern that has been observed, but not foreseen, by policy makers.

This model is developed as a theoretical agent-based model to study the general phenomena of network-based targeting strategies on eco-innovation adoption and diffusion through inter-firm networks.