The model analyzes the economic and ecological effects of a provision of livestock drought insurance for dryland pastoralists. More precisely, it yields qualitative insights into how long-term herd and pasture dynamics change through insurance.

This version 2.1.0 of the uFunk model is about setting a business strategy (the S in the name) for an organization. A team of managers (or executives) meet and discuss various options on the strategy for the firm. There are three aspects that they have to agree on to set the strategic positioning of the organization.
The discussion is on market, stakeholders, and resources. The team (it could be a business strategy task force) considers various aspects of these three elements. The resources they use to develop the discussion can come from a traditional approach to strategy or from non-traditional means (e.g., so-called serious play, creativity and imagination techniques).
The S-uFunk 2.1.0 Model wants to understand to which extent cognitive means triggered by traditional and non-traditional resources affect the making of the strategy process.

The Friendship Field model aims at modelling friendship formation based on three factors: Extraversion, Resemblance and Status, where social interaction is motivated by the Social Battery. Social Battery is one’s energy and motivation to engage in social contact. Since social contact is crucial for friendship formation, the model included Social Battery to affect social interactions. To our best knowledge, Social Battery is a yet unintroduced concept in research while it is a dynamic factor influencing the social interaction besides one’s characteristics. Extraverts’ Social Batteries charge while interacting and exhaust while being alone. Introverts’ Social Batteries charge while being alone and exhaust while interacting. The aim of the model is to illustrate the concept of Social Battery. Moreover, the Friendship Field shows patterns regarding Extraversion, Resemblance and Status including the mere-exposure effect and friendship by similarity. For the implementation of Status, Kemper’s status-power theory is used. The concept of Social Battery is also linked to Kemper’s theory on the organism as reference group. By running the model for a year (3 interactions moments per day), the friendship dynamics over time can be studied.

We presented the model at the Social Simulation Conference 2022.

Country-by-Country Reporting and Automatic Exchange of Information have recently been implemented in European Union (EU) countries. These international tax reforms increase tax compliance in the short term. In the long run, however, taxpayers will continue looking abroad to avoid taxation and, countries, looking for additional revenues, will provide opportunities. As a result, tax competition intensifies and the initial increase in compliance could reverse. To avoid international tax reforms being counteracted by tax competition, this paper suggests bilateral responsive regulation to maximize compliance. This implies that countries would use different tax policy instruments toward other countries, including tax and secrecy havens.

To assess the effectiveness of fully or partially enforce tax policies, this agent based model has been ran many times under different enforcement rules, which influence the perceived enforced- and voluntary compliance, as the slippery-slope model prescribes. Based on the dynamics of this perception and the extent to which agents influence each other, the annual amounts of tax evasion, tax avoidance and taxes paid are calculated over longer periods of time.

The agent-based simulation finds that a differentiated policy response could increase tax compliance by 6.54 percent, which translates into an annual increase of €105 billion in EU tax revenues on income, profits, and capital gains. Corporate income tax revenues in France, Spain, and the UK alone would already account for €35 billion.

We present an agent-based model of worker protest informed by Epstein (2002). Workers have varying degrees of grievance depending on the difference between their wage and the average of their neighbors. They protest with probabilities proportional to grievance, but are inhibited by the risk of being arrested – which is determined by the ratio of coercive agents to probable rebels in the local area. We explore the effect of similarity perception on the dynamics of collective behavior. If […]

Positive feedback can lead to “trapping” in local optima. Adding a simple negative feedback effect, based on ant behaviour, prevents this trapping

The SIM-VOLATILE model is a technology adoption model at the population level. The technology, in this model, is called Volatile Fatty Acid Platform (VFAP) and it is in the frame of the circular economy. The technology is considered an emerging technology and it is in the optimization phase. Through the adoption of VFAP, waste-treatment plants will be able to convert organic waste into high-end products rather than focusing on the production of biogas. Moreover, there are three adoption/investment scenarios as the technology enables the production of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), single-cell oils (SCO), and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). However, due to differences in the processing related to the products, waste-treatment plants need to choose one adoption scenario.

In this simulation, there are several parameters and variables. Agents are heterogeneous waste-treatment plants that face the problem of circular economy technology adoption. Since the technology is emerging, the adoption decision is associated with high risks. In this regard, first, agents evaluate the economic feasibility of the emerging technology for each product (investment scenarios). Second, they will check on the trend of adoption in their social environment (i.e. local pressure for each scenario). Third, they combine these two economic and social assessments with an environmental assessment which is their environmental decision-value (i.e. their status on green technology). This combination gives the agent an overall adaptability fitness value (detailed for each scenario). If this value is above a certain threshold, agents may decide to adopt the emerging technology, which is ultimately depending on their predominant adoption probabilities and market gaps.

This model has been created with and for the researcher-farmers of the Muonde Trust (http://www.muonde.org/), a registered Zimbabwean non-governmental organization dedicated to fostering indigenous innovation. Model behaviors and parameters (mashandiro nemisiyano nedzimwe model) derive from a combination of literature review and the collected datasets from Muonde’s long-term (over 30 years) community-based research. The goals of this model are three-fold (muzvikamu zvitatu):
A) To represent three components of a Zimbabwean agro-pastoral system (crops, woodland grazing area, and livestock) along with their key interactions and feedbacks and some of the human management decisions that may affect these components and their interactions.
B) To assess how climate variation (implemented in several different ways) and human management may affect the sustainability of the system as measured by the continued provisioning of crops, livestock, and woodland grazing area.
C) To provide a discussion tool for the community and local leaders to explore different management strategies for the agro-pastoral system (hwaro/nzira yekudyidzana kwavanhu, zvipfuo nezvirimwa), particularly in the face of climate change.

How do households alter their spending patterns when they experience changes in income? This model answers this question using a random assignment scheme where spending patterns are copied from a household in the new income bracket.

The various technologies used inside a Dutch greenhouse interact in combination with an external climate, resulting in an emergent internal climate, which contributes to the final productivity of the greenhouse. This model examines how differing technology development styles affects the overall ability of a community of growers to approach the theoretical maximum yield.