A model that representa farmers potential to adopt bio-fuels in Georgia

System Narrative
How do rebel groups control territory and engage with the local economy during civil war? Charles Tilly’s seminal War and State Making as Organized Crime (1985) posits that the process of waging war and providing governance resembles that of a protection racket, in which aspiring governing groups will extort local populations in order to gain power, and civilians or businesses will pay in order to ensure their own protection. As civil war research increasingly probes the mechanisms that fuel local disputes and the origination of violence, we develop an agent-based simulation model to explore the economic relationship of rebel groups with local populations, using extortion racket interactions to explain the dynamics of rebel fighting, their impact on the economy, and the importance of their economic base of support. This analysis provides insights for understanding the causes and byproducts of rebel competition in present-day conflicts, such as the cases of South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

Model Description
The model defines two object types: RebelGroup and Enterprise. A RebelGroup is a group that competes for power in a system of anarchy, in which there is effectively no government control. An Enterprise is a local civilian-level actor that conducts business in this environment, whose objective is to make a profit. In this system, a RebelGroup may choose to extort money from Enterprises in order to support its fighting efforts. It can extract payments from an Enterprise, which fears for its safety if it does not pay. This adds some amount of money to the RebelGroup’s resources, and they can return to extort the same Enterprise again. The RebelGroup can also choose to loot the Enterprise instead. This results in gaining all of the Enterprise wealth, but prompts the individual Enterprise to flee, or leave the model. This reduces the available pool of Enterprises available to the RebelGroup for extortion. Following these interactions the RebelGroup can choose to AllocateWealth, or pay its rebel fighters. Depending on the value of its available resources, it can add more rebels or expel some of those which it already has, changing its size. It can also choose to expand over new territory, or effectively increase its number of potential extorting Enterprises. As a response to these dynamics, an Enterprise can choose to Report expansion to another RebelGroup, which results in fighting between the two groups. This system shows how, faced with economic choices, RebelGroups and Enterprises make decisions in war that impact conflict and violence outcomes.

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

Toolkit to specify demographic multistate model with a behavioural element linking intentions to behaviour

The current rate of production and consumption of meat poses a problem both to peoples’ health and to the environment. This work aims to develop a simulation of peoples’ meat consumption behaviour in Britain using agent-based modelling. The agents represent individual consumers. The key variables that characterise agents include sex, age, monthly income, perception of the living cost, and concerns about the impact of meat on the environment, health, and animal welfare. A process of peer influence is modelled with respect to the agents’ concerns. Influence spreads across two eating networks (i.e. co-workers and household members) depending on the time of day, day of the week, and agents’ employment status. Data from a representative sample of British consumers is used to empirically ground the model. Different experiments are run simulating interventions of application of social marketing campaigns and a rise in price of meat. The main outcome is the average weekly consumption of meat per consumer. A secondary outcome is the likelihood of eating meat.

This is an agent-based model constructed in Netlogo v6.2.2 which seeks to provide a simple but flexible tool for researchers and dog-population managers to help inform management decisions.

It replicates the basic demographic processes including:
* reproduction
* natural death
* dispersal
…

Our model allows simulating repeated conservation auctions in low-income countries. It is designed to assess policy-making by exploring the extent to which non-targeted repeated auctions can provide biodiversity conservation cost-effectively, while alleviating poverty. Targeting landholders in order to integrate both goals is claimed to be overambitious and underachieving because of the trade-offs they imply. The simulations offer insight on the possible outcomes that can derive from implementing conservation auctions in low-income countries, where landholders are likely to be risk averse and to face uncertainty.

The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. This agent-based model in Netlogo simulates a group discussion among myside-biased agents, within a Bayesian setting. This model is designed to investigate the effects of the myside bias on the ability of groups to reach a consensus or collectively track the correct answer to a given binary issue.

This model explores a social mechanism that links the reversal of the gender gap in education with changing patterns in relative divorce risks in 12 European countries.

This ABM looks at the effect of multiple reviewers and their behavior on the quality and efficiency of peer review. It models a community of scientists who alternatively act as “author” or “reviewer” at each turn.