The purpose of this curricular model is to teach students the basics of modeling complex systems using agent-based modeling. It is a simple SIR model that simulates how a disease spreads through a population as its members change from susceptible to infected to recovered and then back to susceptible. The dynamics of the model are such that there are multiple emergent outcomes depending on the parameter settings, initial conditions, and chance.

The curricular model can be used with the chapter Agent-Based Modeling in Mixed Methods Research (Moritz et al. 2022) in the Handbook of Teaching Qualitative & Mixed Methods (Ruth et al. 2022).

The instructional videos can be accessed on YouTube: Video 1 (https://youtu.be/32_JIfBodWs); Video 2 (https://youtu.be/0PK_zVKNcp8); and Video 3 (https://youtu.be/0bT0_mYSAJ8).

Scholars have written extensively about hierarchical international order, on the one hand, and war on the other, but surprisingly little work systematically explores the connection between the two. This disconnect is all the more striking given that empirical studies have found a strong relationship between the two. We provide a generative computational network model that explains hierarchy and war as two elements of a larger recursive process: The threat of war drives the formation of hierarchy, which in turn shapes states’ incentives for war. Grounded in canonical theories of hierarchy and war, the model explains an array of known regularities about hierarchical order and conflict. Surprisingly, we also find that many traditional results of the IR literature—including institutional persistence, balancing behavior, and systemic self-regulation—emerge from the interplay between hierarchy and war.

Due to the role of education in promoting social status and facilitating upward social mobility, individuals and their families spare no effort to pursue better educational opportunities, especially in countries where education is highly competitive.

In China, the enrollment of senior high schools and universities mainly follows a ranking system based on students’ scores in national entrance exams (Zhongkao and Gaokao). Typically, students with higher scores have priority in choosing schools and endeavor to get into better senior high schools to increase their chances of entering a prestigious university.

However, students can only select “better” senior high schools based on their average Gaokao grades, which are strongly influenced by the initial performance (Zhongkao grades) of enrolled students. The true quality indicator of school education (schooling effect, defined as the grade improvement achieved through education at the senior high school) is unknowable. This raises the first question: will school rankings reflect the real educational quality of schools over decades of educational competition, or merely the initial quality of the students they enroll?

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We used our model to test how different combinations of dominance interactions present in H. saltator could result in linear, despotic, or shared hierarchies.

This model describes the tranmission of HIV by means of unprotected anal intercourse in a population of men-who-have-sex-with-men.
The model is parameterized based on field data from a cohort study conducted in Atlanta Georgia.

Hybrid model, composed of cellular automata and agents, which attempts to represent the spatial allocation of the population of Brazilian coastal cities based on the use of network analysis metrics as an indication of the attractiveness of the area.

This model extends the bounded confidence model of Deffuant and Weisbuch. It introduces online contexts in which a person can deliver his or her opinion to several other persons. There are 2 additional parameters accessibility and connectivity.

Pastoralscape is a model of human agents, lifestock health and contageous disease for studying the impact of human decision making in pastoral communities within East Africa on livestock populations. It implements an event-driven agent based model in Python 3.

This model allows for analyzing the most efficient levers for enhancing the use of recycled construction materials, and the role of empirically based decision parameters.

This model represents technological and ecological behaviors of mobile hunter-gatherers, in a variable environment, as they produce, use, and discard chipped stone artifacts. The results can be analyzed and compared with archaeological sites.