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

This research aims to uncover the micro-mechanisms that drive the macro-level relationship between cultural tolerance and innovation. We focus on the indirect influence of minorities—specifically, workers with diverse domain expertise—within collaboration networks. We propose that minority influence from individuals with different expertise can serve as a key driver of organizational innovation, particularly in dynamic market environments, and that cultural tolerance is critical for enabling such minority-induced innovation. Our model demonstrates that seemingly conflicting empirical patterns between cultural tightness/looseness and innovation can emerge from the same underlying micro-mechanisms, depending on parameter values. A systematic simulation experiment revealed an optimal cultural configuration: a medium level of tolerance (t = 0.6) combined with low consistency (κ = 0.05) produced the fastest adaptation to abrupt market changes. These findings provide evidence that indirect minority influence is a core micro-mechanism linking cultural tolerance to innovation.

We construct an agent-based model to investigate and understand the roles of green attachment, engagement in local ecological investment (i.e., greening), and social feedback.

The model reproduces the spread of environmental awareness among agents and the impact of awareness level of the agents on the consumption of a resource, like energy. An agent is a household with a set of available advanced smart metering functions.

The model combines the two elements of disorganization and motivation to explore their impact on teams. Effects of disorganization on team task performance (problem solving)

This purpose of this model is to understand how the coupled demographic dynamics of herds and households constrain the growth of livestock populations in pastoral systems.

The purpose of this model is to understand the role of trade networks and their interaction with different fish resources, for fish provision. The model is developed based on a multi-methods approach, combining agent-based modeling, network analysis and qualitative data based on a small-scale fisheries study case. The model can be used to investigate both how trade network structures are embedded in a social-ecological context and the trade processes that occur within them, to analyze how they lead to emergent outcomes related to the resilience of fish provision. The model processes are informed by qualitative data analysis, and the social network analysis of an empirical fish trade network. The network analysis can be used to investigate diverse network structures to perform model experiments, and their influence on model outcomes.

The main outcomes we study are 1) the overexploitation of fish resources and 2) the availability and variability of fish provision to satisfy different market demands, and 3) individual traders’ fish supply at the micro-level. The model has two types of trader agents, seller and dealer. The model reveals that the characteristics of the trade networks, linked to different trader types (that have different roles in those networks), can affect the resilience of fish provision.

The model aims to investigate the role of Microfinance Institutes (MFIs) in strengthening the coping capacity of slum-dwellers (residents) in case of frequent disasters. The main purpose of the model is system understanding. It aids in understanding the following research question: Are the microcredits provided by MFI to start a small business helpful in increasing coping capacity of a slum dweller for recovering from frequent and intense disasters?

DARTS simulates food systems in which agents produce, consume and trade food. Here, food is a summary item that roughly corresponds to commodity food types (e.g. rice). No other food types are taken into account. Each food system (World) consists of its own distribution of agents, regions and connections between agents. Agents differ in their ability to produce food, earn off-farm income and trade food. The agents aim to satisfy their food requirements (which are fixed and equal across agents) by either their own food production or by food purchases. Each simulation step represents one month, in which agents can produce (if they have productive capacity and it is a harvest month for their region), earn off-farm income, trade food (both buy and sell) and consume food. We evaluate the performance of the food system by averaging the agents’ food satisfaction, which is defined as the ratio of the food consumed by each agent at the end of each month divided by her food requirement. At each step, any of the abovementioned attributes related to the agents’ ability to satisfy their food requirement can (temporarily) be shocked. These shocks include reducing the amount of food they produce, removing their ability to trade locally or internationally and reducing their cash savings. Food satisfaction is quantified (both immediately after the shock and in the year following the shock) to evaluate food security of a particular food system, both at the level of agent types (e.g. the urban poor and the rural poor) and at the systems level. Thus, the effects of shocks on food security can be related to the food system’s structure.

The main function of this simulation model is to simulate the onset of individual panic in the context of a public health event, and in particular to simulate how an individual’s panic develops and dies out in the context of a dual information contact network of online social media information and offline in-person perception information. In this model, eight different scenarios are set up by adjusting key parameters according to the difference in the amount and nature of information circulating in the dual information network, in order to observe how the agent’s panic behavior will change under different information exposure situations.