Takács, K. and Squazzoni, F. 2015. High Standards Enhance Inequality in Idealized Labor Markets. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(4), 2, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/18/4/2.html
We built a simple model of an idealized labor market, in which there is no objective difference in average quality between groups and hiring decisions are not biased in favor of any particular group. Our results show that inequality in employment emerges necessarily also in such idealized situations due to the limited supply of high quality individuals and asymmetric information. Inequalities are exacerbated when employers have high standards and keep only the best workers in house. We found that ambitious workers get higher quality jobs even if ambition does not correlate or even negatively correlates with internal quality. Our findings help to corroborate empirical findings on higher employment discrepancies in high rather than low status jobs.

The purpose of the presented ABM is to explore how system resilience is affected by external disturbances and internal dynamics by using the stylized model of an agricultural land use system.

We explore land system resilience with a stylized land use model in which agents’ land use activities are affected by external shocks, agent interactions, and endogenous feedbacks. External shocks are designed as yield loss in crops, which is ubiquitous in almost every land use system where perturbations can occur due to e.g. extreme weather conditions or diseases. Agent interactions are designed as the transfer of buffer capacity from farmers who can and are willing to provide help to other farmers within their social network. For endogenous feedbacks, we consider land use as an economic activity which is regulated by markets — an increase in crop production results in lower price (a negative feedback) and an agglomeration of a land use results in lower production costs for the land use type (a positive feedback).

The model simulates flood damages and its propagation through a cooperative, productive, farming system, characterized as a star-type network, where all elements in the system are connected one to each other through a central element.

This model studies the emergence and dynamics of generalized trust. It does so by modeling agents that engage in trust games and, based on their experience, slowly determine whether others are, in general, trustworthy.

This model examines how financial and social top-down interventions interplay with the internal self-organizing dynamics of a fishing community. The aim is to transform from hierarchical fishbuyer-fisher relationship into fishing cooperatives.

This model simulate product diffusion on different social network structures.

The SWE models firms search behaviour as the performance landscape shifts. The shift represents society’s pricing of negative externalities, and the performance landscape is an NK structure. The model is written in NetLogo.

ARISE is a hybrid energy model incorporating macroeconomic data, micro socio-economic data, engineering data and environmental data. This version of ARISE can simulate scenarios of solar energy policy for Indonesia case.

The (cultural) evolution of cooperative breeding in harsh environments.

Model explains both the final state and the dynamics of the development process of the wine sector in the Małopolska region in Poland. Model admits heterogeneous agents (regular farms,large and small vineyards).