This model has been developed together with the publication ‘Modelling Value Change - An Exploratory Approach’

Value change and moral change have increasingly become topics of interest in the philosophical literature. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed. Such accounts are usually based on certain theoretical and conceptual assumptions and their strengths and weaknesses are often hard to determine and compare, also because they are based on limited empirical evidence.

We propose that a step forward can be made with the help of agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM can be used to investigate whether a simulation model based on a specific account of value change can reproduce relevant phenomena. To illustrate this approach, we built a model based on the pragmatist account of value change proposed in van de Poel and Kudina (2022). We show that this model can reproduce four relevant phenomena, namely 1) the inevitability and stability of values, 2) how different societies may react differently to external shocks, 3) moral revolutions, and 4) lock-in.

This model aims at creating agent populations that have “personalities”, as described by the Big Five Model of Personality. The expression of the Big Five in the agent population has the following properties, so that they resemble real life populations as closely as possible:
-The population mean of each trait is 0.5 on a scale from 0 to 1.
-The population-wide distribution of each trait approximates a normal distribution.
-The intercorrelations of the Big Five are close to those observed in the Literature.

The literature used to fit the model was a publication by Dimitri van der Linden, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Arnold B. Bakker:
…

In Western countries, the distribution of relative incomes within marriages tends to be skewed in a remarkable way. Husbands usually do not only earn more than their female partners, but there also is a striking discontinuity in their relative contributions to the household income at the 50/50 point: many wives contribute just a bit less than or as much as their husbands, but few contribute more. Our model makes it possible to study a social mechanism that might create this ‘cliff’: women and men differ in their incomes (even outside marriage) and this may differentially affect their abilities to find similar- or higher-income partners. This may ultimately contribute to inequalities within the households that form. The model and associated files make it possible to assess the merit of this mechanism in 27 European countries.

This model expands approaches from social practice theories and is used to investigate the ability of the underlying conceptual model to explain the emergence of social practices, defined as routine behaviour that is similar amoung peers.

The model that simulates the dynamic creation and maintenance of knowledge-based formations such as communities of scientists, fashion movements, and subcultures. The model’s environment is a spatial one, representing not geographical space, but a “knowledge space” in which each point is a different collection of knowledge elements. Agents moving through this space represent people’s differing and changing knowledge and beliefs. The agents have only very simple behaviors: If they are “lonely,” that is, far from a local concentration of agents, they move toward the crowd; if they are crowded, they move away.

Running the model shows that the initial uniform random distribution of agents separates into “clumps,” in which some agents are central and others are distributed around them. The central agents are crowded, and so move. In doing so, they shift the centroid of the clump slightly and may make other agents either crowded or lonely, and they too will move. Thus, the clump of agents, although remaining together for long durations (as measured in time steps), drifts across the view. Lonely agents move toward the clump, sometimes joining it and sometimes continuing to trail behind it. The clumps never merge.

The model is written in NetLogo (v6). It is used as a demonstration of agent-based modelling in Gilbert, N. (2008) Agent-Based Models (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences). Sage Publications, Inc. and described in detail in Gilbert, N. (2007) “A generic model of collectivities,” Cybernetics and Systems. European Meeting on Cybernetic Science and Systems Research, 38(7), pp. 695–706.

The purpose of this agent-based model is to compare different variants of crowdworking in a general way, so that the obtained results are independent of specific details of the crowdworking platform. It features many adjustable parameters that can be used to calibrate the model to empirical data, but also when not calibrated it yields essential results about crowdworking in general.
Agents compete for contracts on a virtual crowdworking platform. Each agent is defined by various properties like qualification and income expectation. Agents that are unable to turn a profit have a chance to quit the crowdworking platform and new crowdworkers can replace them. Thus the model has features of an evolutionary process, filtering out the ill suited agents, and generating a realistic distribution of agents from an initially random one. To simulate a stable system, the amount of contracts issued per day can be set constant, as well as the number of crowdworkers. If one is interested in a dynamically changing platform, the simulation can also be initialized in a way that increases or decreases the number of crowdworkers or number of contracts over time. Thus, a large variety of scenarios can be investigated.

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.

A flexible framework for Agent-Based Models (ABM), the ‘epiworldR’ package provides methods for prototyping disease outbreaks and transmission models using a ‘C++’ backend, making it very fast. It supports multiple epidemiological models, including the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS), Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR), Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Removed (SEIR), and others, involving arbitrary mitigation policies and multiple-disease models. Users can specify infectiousness/susceptibility rates as a function of agents’ features, providing great complexity for the model dynamics. Furthermore, ‘epiworldR’ is ideal for simulation studies featuring large populations.

This model is used to investigate the role of opinion leader. More specifically: the influence of ‘innovative behavior’, ‘weigth of normative influence’, ‘better product judgment’, ‘number of opinion

The CONSERVAT model evaluates the effect of social influence among farmers in the Lake Naivasha basin (Kenya) on the spatiotemporal diffusion pattern of soil conservation effort levels and the resulting reduction in lake sedimentation.