This model aims to explore how gambling-like behavior can emerge in loot box spending within gaming communities. A loot box is a purchasable mystery box that randomly awards the player a series of in-game items. Since the contents of the box are largely up to chance, many players can fall into a compulsion loop of purchasing, as the fear of missing out and belief in the gambler’s fallacy allow one to rationalize repeated purchases, especially when one compares their own luck to others. To simulate this behavior, this model generates players in different network structures to observe how factors such as network connectivity, a player’s internal decision making strategy, or even common manipulations games use these days may influence a player’s transactions.

CROwd Simulation of Situated individuals represents a modern generation simulation as a (social) scientific tool for understanding crowd behaviour. The CROSS model represents individuals in a crowd as social-cognitive agents that are affected by their social and physical surroundings and produce behaviour and behaviour patterns.

This model simulates a foraging system based on Middle Stone Age plant and shellfish foraging in South Africa.

This model inspects the performance of firms as the product attribute space changes, which evolves as a consequence of firms’ actions. Firms may create new product variants by dragging demand from other existing variants. Firms decide whether to open new product variants, to invade existing ones, or to keep their variant portfolio. At each variant there is a Cournot competition each round. Competition is nested since many firms compete at many variants simultaneously, affecting firm composition at each location (variant).

After the Cournot outcomes, at each round firms decide whether to (i) keep their existing product variant niche, (ii) invade an existing variant, (iii) create a new variant, or (iv) abandon a variant. Firms’ profits across their niche take into consideration the niche-width cost and the cost of opening a new variant.

This model examines language dynamics within a social network using simulation techniques to represent the interplay of language adoption, social influence, economic incentives, and language policies. The agent-based model (ABM) focuses on interactions between agents endowed with specific linguistic attributes, who engage in communication based on predefined rules. A key feature of our model is the incorporation of network analysis, structuring agent relationships as a dynamic network and leveraging network metrics to capture the evolving inter-agent connections over time. This integrative approach provides nuanced insights into emergent behaviors and system dynamics, offering an analytical framework that extends beyond traditional modeling approaches. By combining agent-based modeling with network analysis, the model sheds light on the underlying mechanisms governing complex language systems and can be effectively paired with sociolinguistic observational data.

We develop an IBM that predicts how interactions between elephants, poachers, and law enforcement affect poaching levels within a virtual protected area. The model is theoretical at this stage and is not meant to provide a realistic depiction of poaching, but instead to demonstrate how IBMs can expand upon the existing modelling work done in this field, and to provide a framework for future research. The model could be further developed into a useful management support tool to predict the outcomes of various poaching mitigation strategies at real-world locations. The model was implemented in NetLogo version 6.1.0.

We first compared a scenario in which poachers have prescribed, non-adaptive decision-making and move randomly across the landscape, to one in which poachers adaptively respond to their memories of elephant locations and where other poachers have been caught by law enforcement. We then compare a situation in which ranger effort is distributed unevenly across the protected area to one in which rangers patrol by adaptively following elephant matriarchal herds.

Within the archeological record for Bronze Age Chinese culture, there continues to be a gap in our understanding of the sudden rise of the Erlitou State from the previous late Longshan chiefdoms. In order to examine this period, I developed and used an agent-based model (ABM) to explore possible socio-politically relevant hypotheses for the gap between the demise of the late Longshan cultures and rise of the first state level society in East Asia. I tested land use strategy making and collective action in response to drought and flooding scenarios, the two plausible environmental hazards at that time. The model results show cases of emergent behavior where an increase in social complexity could have been experienced if a catastrophic event occurred while the population was sufficiently prepared for a different catastrophe, suggesting a plausible lead for future research into determining the life of the time period.

The ABM published here was originally developed in 2016 and its results published in the Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference.

Routes & Rumours is an agent-based model of (forced) human migration. We model the formation of migration routes under the assumption that migrants have limited geographical knowledge concerning the transit area and rely to a large degree on information obtained from other migrants.

A logging agent builds roads based on the location of high-value hotspots, and cuts trees based on road access. A forest monitor sanctions the logger on observed infractions, reshaping the pattern of road development.

Patagonia PSMED is an agent-based model designed to study a simple case of Evolution of Ethnic Differentiation. It replicates how can hunter-gatherer societies evolve and built cultural identities as a consequence of the way they interacted.