We study the impact of endogenous creation and destruction of social ties in an artificial society on aggregate outcomes such as generalized trust, willingness to cooperate, social utility and economic performance. To this end we put forward a computational multi-agent model where agents of overlapping generations interact in a dynamically evolving social network. In the model, four distinct dimensions of individuals’ social capital: degree, centrality, heterophilous and homophilous interactions, determine their generalized trust and willingness to cooperate, altogether helping them achieve certain levels of social utility (i.e., utility from social contacts) and economic performance. We find that the stationary state of the simulated social network exhibits realistic small-world topology. We also observe that societies whose social networks are relatively frequently reconfigured, display relatively higher generalized trust, willingness to cooperate, and economic performance – at the cost of lower social utility. Similar outcomes are found for societies where social tie dissolution is relatively weakly linked to family closeness.

The model answers the question how homophily and number of close-links in small-world network influences behavior of consumats. The results show that the more close-links the more probable the consumat follows the major behavior, but homophilly blocks the major behavior and supports survival of the minor behavior.

A series of studies show the applicability of the NK model in the crowdsourcing research, but it also exposes a problem that the application of the NK model is not tightly integrated with crowdsourcing process, which leads to lack of a basic crowdsourcing simulation model. Accordingly, by introducing interaction relationship among task decisions to define three tasks of different structure: local task, small-world task and random task, and introducing bounded rationality and its two dimensions are taken into account: bounded rationality level that used to distinguish industry types and bounded rationality bias that used to differentiate professional users and ordinary users, an agent-based model that simulates the problem-solving process of tournament-based crowdsourcing is constructed by combining the NK fitness landscapes and the crowdsourcing framework of “Task-Crowd-Process-Evaluation”.

The model formalizes a situation where agents embedded in different types of networks (random, small world and scale free networks) interact with their neighbors and express an opinion that is the result of different mechanisms: a coherence mechanism, in which agents try to stick to their previously expressed opinions; an assessment mechanism, in which agents consider available external information on the topic; and a social influence mechanism, in which agents tend to approach their neighbor’s opinions.

A series of studies show the applicability of the NK model in the crowdsourcing research, but it also exposes a problem that the application of the NK model is not tightly integrated with crowdsourcing process, which leads to lack of a basic crowdsourcing simulation model. Accordingly, by introducing interaction relationship among task decisions to define three tasks of different structure: local task, small-world task and random task, and introducing bounded rationality and its two dimensions are taken into account: bounded rationality level that used to distinguish industry types and bounded rationality bias that used to differentiate professional users and ordinary users, an agent-based model that simulates the problem-solving process of tournament-based crowdsourcing is constructed by combining the NK fitness landscapes and the crowdsourcing framework of “Task-Crowd-Process-Evaluation”.

The model studies the dynamics of risk-sharing cooperatives among heterogeneous farmers. Based on their knowledge on their risk exposure and the performance of the cooperative farmers choose whether or not to remain in the risk-sharing agreement.

This model simulates how collective self-organisation among individuals that manage irrigation resource collectively.

This adaptation of the Relative Agreement model of opinion dynamics (Deffuant et al. 2002) extends the Meadows and Cliff (2012) implementation of this model in a manner that explores the effect of the network structure among the agents.

We used a computer simulation to measure how well different network structures (fully connected, small world, lattice, and random) find and exploit resource peaks in a variable environment.

The model is an experimental ground to study the impact of network structure on diffusion. It allows to construct a social network that already has some measurable level of homophily, and simulate a diffusion process over this social network.