The DiDIY-Factory model is a model of an abstract factory. Its purpose is to investigate the impact Digital Do-It-Yourself (DiDIY) could have on the domain of work and organisation.

DiDIY can be defined as the set of all manufacturing activities (and mindsets) that are made possible by digital technologies. The availability and ease of use of digital technologies together with easily accessible shared knowledge may allow anyone to carry out activities that were previously only performed by experts and professionals. In the context of work and organisations, the DiDIY effect shakes organisational roles by such disintermediation of experts. It allows workers to overcome the traditionally strict organisational hierarchies by having direct access to relevant information, e.g. the status of machines via real-time information systems implemented in the factory.

A simulation model of this general scenario needs to represent a more or less abstract manufacturing firm with supervisors, workers, machines and tasks to be performed. Experiments with such a model can then be run to investigate the organisational structure –- changing from a strict hierarchy to a self-organised, seemingly anarchic organisation.

A minimal genetic algorithm was previously developed in order to solve an elementary arithmetic problem. It has been modified to explore the effect of a mutator gene and the consequent entrance into a hypermutation state. The phenomenon seems relevant in some types of tumorigenesis and in a more general way, in cells and tissues submitted to chronic sublethal environmental or genomic stress.
For a long time, some scholars suppose that organisms speed up their own evolution by varying mutation rate, but evolutionary biologists are not convinced that evolution can select a mechanism promoting more (often harmful) mutations looking forward to an environmental challenge.
The model aims to shed light on these controversial points of view and it provides also the features required to check the role of sex and genetic recombination in the mutator genes diffusion.

This model is designed to address the following research question: How does the amount and topology of intergroup cultural transmission modulate the effect of local group extinction on selectively neutral cultural diversity in a geographically structured population? The experimental design varies group extinction rate, the amount of intergroup cultural transmission, and the topology of intergroup cultural transmission while measuring the effects of local group extinction on long-term cultural change and regional cultural differentiation in a constant-size, spatially structured population. The results show that for most of the intergroup social network topologies tested here, increasing the amount of intergroup cultural transmission (similar to increasing gene flow in a genetic model) erases the negative effect of local group extinction on selectively neutral cultural diversity. The stochastic (i.e., preference attachment) network seems to stand out as an exception.

A simple model is constructed using C# in order to to capture key features of market dynamics, while also producing reasonable results for the individual insurers. A replication of Taylor’s model is also constructed in order to compare results with the new premium setting mechanism. To enable the comparison of the two premium mechanisms, the rest of the model set-up is maintained as in the Taylor model. As in the Taylor example, homogeneous customers represented as a total market exposure which is allocated amongst the insurers.

In each time period, the model undergoes the following steps:
1. Insurers set competitive premiums per exposure unit
2. Losses are generated based on each insurer’s share of the market exposure
3. Accounting results are calculated for each insurer
…

Here we share the raw results of the social experiments of the paper “Gossip and competitive altruism support cooperation in a Public Good Game” by Giardini, Vilone, Sánchez, Antonioni, under review for Philosophical Transactions B. The experiment is thoroughly described there, in the following we summarize the main features of the experimental setup. The authors are available for further clarifications if requested.

Participants were recruited from the LINEEX subjects pool (University of Valencia Experimental Economics lab). 160 participants mean age = 21.7 years; 89 female) took part in this study in return for a flat payment of 5 EUR and the opportunity to earn an additional payment ranging from 8 to 16 EUR (mean total payment = 17.5 EUR). 80 subjects, divided into 5 groups of 16, took part in the competitive treatment while other 80 subjects participated in the non-competitive treatment. Laboratory experiments were conducted at LINEEX on September 16th and 17th, 2015.

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 research article presents an agent-based simulation hereinafter called COMMONSIM. It builds on COMMONISM, i.e. a large-scale commons-based vision for a utopian society. In this society, production and distribution of means are not coordinated via markets, exchange, and money, or a central polity, but via bottom-up signalling and polycentric networks, i.e. ex-ante coordination via needs. Heterogeneous agents care for each other in life groups and produce in different groups care, environmental as well as intermediate and final means to satisfy sensual-vital needs. Productive needs decide on the magnitude of activity in groups for a common interest, e.g. the production of means in a multi-sectoral artificial economy. Agents share cultural traits identified by different behaviour: a propensity for egoism, leisure, environmentalism, and productivity. The narrative of this utopian society follows principles of critical psychology and sociology, complexity and evolution, the theory of commons, and critical political economy. The article presents the utopia and an agent-based study of it, with emphasis on culture-dependent allocation mechanisms and their social and economic implications for agents and groups.

The purpose of this model is to explore the influence of integrating individuals’ behavioral dynamics in an agent-based model of COVID-19, on the dynamics of disease transmission. The model is an agent-based extention of an established large-scale Individual-based model called STRIDE. Four risk factors determine the individual’s perception of the risk and how they behave accordingly. It is assumed that individuals with higher levels of risk perception adopt higher levels of contact reduction in their daily routines. Individuals can assign different weights to any of the four different risk factors, i.e., the modeler can model different populations and explore how the transmission dynamics vary among them.

This model investigates the link between prescribed growth in body size, population dynamics and density dependence through population feedback on available resources.

The goal of the paper is to propose an abstract but formalised model of how Schwartz higher order values may influence individual decisions on sharing an individual effort among alternative economic activities. Subsequently, individual decisions are aggregated into the total (collective) economic output, taking into account interactions between the agents. In particular, we explore the relationship between individual higher order values: Self–Enhancement, Self–Transcendence, Openness to Change, and Conservation – measured according to Schwartz’s universal human values theory – and individual and collective economic performance, by means of a theoretical agent based model. Furthermore, based on empirical observations, Openness to Change (measured by the population average in the case of collective output) is positively associated with individual and collective output. These relations are negative for Conservation. Self-Enhancement is positively associated with individual output but negatively with collective output. In case of Self–Transcendence, this effect is opposite. The model provides the potential explanations, in terms of individual and population differences in: propensity for management, willingness to change, and skills (measured by an educational level) for the empirically observed relations between Schwartz higher order values and individual and collective output. We directly calibrate the micro–level of the model using data from the ninth round of the European Social Survey (ESS9) and present the results of numerical simulations.