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.

Objective is to simulate policy interventions in an integrated demand-supply model. The underlying demand function links both sides. Diffusion proceeds if interactions distribute awareness (Epidemic effect) and rivalry reduces the market price (Probit effect). Endogeneity is given due to the fact that consumer awareness as well as their willingness-to-pay drives supply-side rivalry. Firm´s entry and exit decisions as well as quantity and price settings are driven by Cournot competition.

The model explores the impact of public disclosure on tax compliance among diverse agents, including individual taxpayers and a tax authority. It incorporates heterogeneous preferences and income endowments among taxpayers, captured through a utility function that considers psychic costs subtracted from expected pecuniary utility. These costs include moral, reciprocity, and stigma costs associated with norm violations, leading to variations in taxpayers’ risk attitudes and related parameters. The tax authority’s attributes, such as the frequency of random audits, penalty rate, and the choice between partial or full disclosure, remain fixed throughout the simulation. Income endowments and preference parameters are randomly assigned to taxpayers at the outset.

Taxpayers maximize their expected utility by reporting income, taking into account tax, penalty, and audit rates. They make annual decisions based on their own and their peers’ behaviors from the previous year. Taxpayers indirectly interact at the societal level through public disclosure conducted by the tax authority, exchanging tax information among peers. Each period in the simulation collects data on total reported income, average compliance rates per income group, distribution of compliance rates, counts of compliers, full evaders, partial evaders, and the numbers of taxpayers experiencing guilt and anger. The model evaluates whether public disclosure positively or negatively impacts compliance rates and quantifies this impact based on aggregated individual reporting behaviors.

The “Descriptive Norm and Fraud Dynamics” model demonstrates how fraudulent behavior can either proliferate or be contained within non-hierarchical organizations, such as peer networks, through social influence taking the form of a descriptive norm. This model expands on the fraud triangle theory, which posits that an individual must concurrently possess a financial motive, perceive an opportunity, and hold a pro-fraud attitude to engage in fraudulent activities (red agent). In the absence of any of these elements, the individual will act honestly (green agent).

The model explores variations in a descriptive norm mechanism, ranging from local distorted knowledge to global perfect knowledge. In the case of local distorted knowledge, agents primarily rely on information from their first-degree colleagues. This knowledge is often distorted because agents are slow to update their empirical expectations, which are only partially revised after one-to-one interactions. On the other end of the spectrum, local perfect knowledge is achieved by incorporating a secondary source of information into the agents’ decision-making process. Here, accurate information provided by an observer is used to update empirical expectations.

The model shows that the same variation of the descriptive norm mechanism could lead to varying aggregate fraud levels across different fraud categories. Two empirically measured norm sensitivity distributions associated with different fraud categories can be selected into the model to see the different aggregate outcomes.

Is the mass shooter a maniac or a relatively normal person in a state of great stress? According to the FBI report (Silver, J., Simons, A., & Craun, S. (2018). A Study of the Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States Between 2000 – 2013. Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice,Washington, D.C. 20535.), only 25% of the active shooters were known to have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental illness of any kind prior to the offense.
The main objects of the model are the humans and the guns. The main factors influencing behavior are the population size, the number of people with mental disabilities (“psycho” in the model terminology) per 100,000 population, the total number of weapons (“guns”) in the population, the availability of guns for humans, the intensity of stressors affecting humans and the threshold level of stress, upon reaching which a person commits an act of mass shooting.
The key difference (in the model) between a normal person and a psycho is that a psycho accumulates stressors and, upon reaching a threshold level, commits an act of mass shooting. A normal person is exposed to stressors, but reaching the threshold level for killing occurs only when the simultaneous effect of stressors on him exceeds this level.
The population dynamics are determined by the following factors: average (normally distributed) life expectancy (“life_span” attribute of humans) and population growth with the percentage of newborns set by the value of the TickReprRatio% slider of the current population volume from 16 to 45 years old.Thus, one step of model time corresponds to a year.

This model/program presents a “three industry model” that may be particularly useful for macroeconomic simulations. The main purpose of this program is to demonstrate a mechanism in which the relative share of labor shifts between industries.

Care has been taken so that it is written in a self-documenting way so that it may be useful to anyone that might build from it or use it as an example.

This model is not intended to match a specific economy (and is not calibrated to do so) but its particular minimalist implementation may be useful for future research/development.

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Model of influence of access to social information spread via social network on decisions in a two-person game.

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 […]

We reconstruct Cohen, March and Olsen’s Garbage Can model of organizational choice as an agent-based model. We add another means for avoiding making decisions: buck-passing difficult problems to colleagues.

The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice is a fundamental model of organizational decision-making originally proposed by J.D. Cohen, J.G. March and J.P. Olsen in 1972. In the 2000s, G. Fioretti and A. Lomi presented a NetLogo agent-based interpretation of this model. This code is the NetLogo 6.1.1 updated version of the Fioretti-Lomi model.