The natural selection of foresight, an accuracy at assess the environment, under degrees of environmental heterogeneity. The model is designed to connect local scale mobility, from foraging, with the global scale phenomenon of population dispersal.

Patagonia PSMED is an agent-based model designed to study a simple case of Evolution of Ethnic Differentiation. It replicates how can hunter-gatherer societies evolve and built cultural identities as a consequence of the way they interacted.

We develop a spatial, evolutionary model of the endogenous formation and dissolution of groups using a renewable common pool resource. We use this foundation to measure the evolutionary pressures at different organizational levels.

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).

This NetLogo model illustrates the cultural evolution of pro-environmental behaviour patterns. It illustrates how collective behaviour patterns evolve from interactions between agents and agents (in a social network) as well as agents and the affordances (action opportunities provided by the environment) within a niche. More specifically, the cultural evolution of behaviour patterns is understood in this model as a product of:

1. The landscape of affordances provided by the material environment,
2. Individual learning and habituation,
3. Social learning and network structure,
4. Personal states (such as habits and attitudes), and
   …

Organizations operate under conditions of imperfect performance in which human error is inevitable, yet errors are rarely examined as the triggers for the managerial interactions that shape organizational culture over time. The present research introduces an agent-based simulation of a work team completing a fixed sequence of tasks under varying degrees of managerial oversight and response policy. The model isolates the mechanical loss of throughput caused by errors from the psychological and cultural consequences of managerial reactions, which are categorized into ignoring, correcting or punishing. Furthermore, the model incorporates an autonomous self-notice mechanism, allowing workers to correct themselves in the absence of managerial intervention. By tracking the accumulation of worker resentment and the transient enhancements in learning, the simulation acts as a dynamic laboratory for observing delayed consequences, nonlinear tipping points and systemic organizational collapse. The results reveal a central paradox of organizational control. Highly monitored punitive environments generate high short-term throughput, yet they simultaneously accumulate interactional injustice and resentment that engineer a rapid cascading turnover and the highest probability of systemic collapse. Conversely, corrective policies combined with active monitoring achieve equivalent throughput while sustaining workforce viability. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis establishes that error accumulation is primarily determined by structural factors, namely agent-level mistake propensity and task difficulty, while resignation dynamics, resentment accumulation and collapse timing remain predominantly governed by managerial policy, a hierarchy independently corroborated by a surrogate model and shown to be stable across independent seeds and across stakeholder weighting scenarios. The study bridges the operational mechanics of task completion and the social dynamics of workplace mistreatment, illustrating how short-term punitive success often masks long-term structural fragility.

IOP 2.1.2 is an agent-based simulation model designed to explore the relations between (1) employees, (2) tasks and (3) resources in an organizational setting. By comparing alternative cognitive strategies in the use of resources, employees face increasingly demanding waves of tasks that derive by challenges the organization face to adapt to a turbulent environment. The assumption tested by this model is that a successful organizational adaptation, called plastic, is necessarily tied to how employees handle pressure coming from existing and new tasks. By comparing alternative cognitive strategies, connected to ‘docility’ (Simon, 1993; Secchi, 2011) and ‘extended’ cognition (Clark, 2003, Secchi & Cowley, 2018), IOP 2.1.2 is an attempt to indicate which strategy is most suitable and under which scenario.

Must tax-benefit policy making be limited to the ‘experts’?

This Repast Simphony model simulates genomic admixture during the farming expansion of human groups from mainland Asia into the Papuan dominated islands of Southeast Asia during the Neolithic period.

This NetLogo model is an implementation of the mostly verbal (and graphic) model in Jarret Walker’s Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (2011). Walker’s discussion is in the chapter “Connections or Complexity?”. See especially figure 12-2, which is on page 151.

In “Connections or Complexity?”, Walker frames the matter as involving a choice between two conflicting goals. The first goal is to minimize connections, the need to make transfers, in a transit system. People naturally prefer direct routes. The second goal is to minimize complexity. Why? Well, read the chapter, but as a general proposition we want to avoid unnecessary complexity with its attendant operating characteristics (confusing route plans in the case of transit) and management and maintenance challenges. With complexity general comes degraded robustness and resilience.

How do we, how can we, choose between these conflicting goals? The grand suggestion here is that we only choose indirectly, implicitly. In the present example of connections versus complexity we model various alternatives and compare them on measures of performance (MoP) other than complexity or connections per se. The suggestion is that connections and complexity are indicators of, heuristics for, other MoPs that are more fundamental, such as cost, robustness, energy use, etc., and it is these that we at bottom care most about. (Alternatively, and not inconsistently, we can view connections and complexity as two of many MoPs, with the larger issue to be resolve in light of many MoPs, including but not limited to complexity and connections.) We employ modeling to get a handle on these MoPs. Typically, there will be several, taking us thus to a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) situation. That’s the big picture.