A group of agents share a resource and agents will become sufficiently motivated to adopt a rule to constraint their freedom if they experience resource scarcity and developed mutual trust relationships.

This model is part of an article that discusses the adoption of a complexity theory approach to study the dynamics of language contact within multilingual communities. The model simulates the dynamics of communication within a community where a minority and a majority group coexist. The individual choice of language for communication is based on a number of simple rules derived from a review of the main literature on the topic of language contact. These rules are then combined with different variables, such as the rate of exogamy of the minority group and the presence of relevant education policies, to estimate the trends of assimilation of the minority group into the majority one. The model is validated using actually observed data from the case of Romansh speakers in the canton of Grisons, Switzerland.

This is a simulation model to explore possible outcomes of the Port of Mars cardgame. Port of Mars is a resource allocation game examining how people navigate conflicts between individual goals and common interests relative to shared resources. The game involves five players, each of whom must decide how much of their time and effort to invest in maintaining public infrastructure and renewing shared resources and how much to expend in pursuit of their individual goals. In the game, “Upkeep” is a number that represents the physical health of the community. This number begins at 100 and goes down by twenty-five points each round, representing resource consumption and wear and tear on infrastructure. If that number reaches zero, the community collapses and everyone dies.

The objective of this agent-based model is to test different language education orientations and their consequences for the EU population in terms of linguistic disenfranchisement, that is, the inability of citizens to understand EU documents and parliamentary discussions should their native language(s) no longer be official. I will focus on the impact of linguistic distance and language learning. Ideally, this model would be a tool to help EU policy makers make informed decisions about language practices and education policies, taking into account their consequences in terms of diversity and linguistic disenfranchisement. The model can be used to force agents to make certain choices in terms of language skills acquisition. The user can then go on to compare different scenarios in which language skills are acquired according to different rationales. The idea is that, by forcing agents to adopt certain language learning strategies, the model user can simulate policies promoting the acquisition of language skills and get an idea of their impact. In this way the model allows not only to sketch various scenarios of the evolution of language skills among EU citizens, but also to estimate the level of disenfranchisement in each of these scenarios.

An agent model is presented that aims to capture the impact of cheap talk on collective action in a commons dilemma. The commons dilemma is represented as a spatially explicit renewable resource. Agent’s trust in others impacts the speed and harvesting rate, and trust is impacted by observed harvesting behavior and cheap talk. We calibrated the model using experimental data (DeCaro et al. 2021). The best fit to the data consists of a population with a small frequency of altruistic and selfish agents, and mostly conditional cooperative agents sensitive to inequality and cheap talk. This calibrated model provides an empirical test of the behavioral theory of collective action of Elinor Ostrom and Humanistic Rational Choice Theory.

The various technologies used inside a Dutch greenhouse interact in combination with an external climate, resulting in an emergent internal climate, which contributes to the final productivity of the greenhouse. This model examines how differing technology development styles affects the overall ability of a community of growers to approach the theoretical maximum yield.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, governments agreed on and accepted CO2 reduction targets in order to counter climate change. In Europe one of the main policy instruments to meet the agreed reduction targets is CO2 emission-trading (CET), which was implemented as of January 2005. In this system, companies active in specific sectors must be in the possession of CO2 emission rights to an amount equal to their CO2 emission. In Europe, electricity generation accounts for one-third of CO2 emissions. Since the power generation sector, has been liberalized, reregulated and privatized in the last decade, around Europe autonomous companies determine the sectors’ CO2 emission. Short-term they adjust their operation, long-term they decide on (dis)investment in power generation facilities and technology selection. An agent-based model is presented to elucidate the effect of CET on the decisions of power companies in an oligopolistic market. Simulations over an extensive scenario-space show that there CET does have an impact. A long-term portfolio shift towards less-CO2 intensive power generation is observed. However, the effect of CET is relatively small and materializes late. The absolute emissions from power generation rise under most scenarios. This corresponds to the dominant character of current capacity expansion planned in the Netherlands (50%) and in Germany (68%), where companies have announced many new coal based power plants. Coal is the most CO2 intensive option available and it seems surprising that even after the introduction of CET these capacity expansion plans indicate a preference for coal. Apparently in power generation the economic effect of CO2 emission-trading is not sufficient to outweigh the economic incentives to choose for coal.

With this model, we investigate resource extraction and labor conditions in the Global South as well as implications for climate change originating from industry emissions in the North. The model serves as a testbed for simulation experiments with evolutionary political economic policies addressing these issues. In the model, heterogeneous agents interact in a self-organizing and endogenously developing economy. The economy contains two distinct regions – an abstract Global South and Global North. There are three interlinked sectors, the consumption good–, capital good–, and resource production sector. Each region contains an independent consumption good sector, with domestic demand for final goods. They produce a fictitious consumption good basket, and sell it to the households in the respective region. The other sectors are only present in one region. The capital good sector is only found in the Global North, meaning capital goods (i.e. machines) are exclusively produced there, but are traded to the foreign as well as the domestic market as an intermediary. For the production of machines, the capital good firms need labor, machines themselves and resources. The resource production sector, on the other hand, is only located in the Global South. Mines extract resources and export them to the capital firms in the North. For the extraction of resources, the mines need labor and machines. In all three sectors, prices, wages, number of workers and physical capital of the firms develop independently throughout the simulation. To test policies, an international institution is introduced sanctioning the polluting extractivist sector in the Global South as well as the emitting industrial capital good producers in the North with the aim of subsidizing innovation reducing environmental and social impacts.

The model combines the two elements of disorganization and motivation to explore their impact on teams. Effects of disorganization on team task performance (problem solving)

This model allows for the investigation of the effect spatial clustering of raw material sources has on the outcome of the neutral model of stone raw material procurement by Brantingham (2003).