Overview

Purpose

Modeling an economy with stable macro signals, that works as a benchmark for studying the effects of the agent activities, e.g. extortion, at the service of the elaboration of public policies..
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An agent-based model of one colony of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius, from the day a mated queen lands to the death of the colony. It runs in a web browser and, unchanged, headless in Node for replicate studies.

What the ants do: a claustral queen digs her own shaft and raises the first workers on her reserves; workers dig the nest under local rules, with no ant holding a plan; a one-way, age-based division of labour set by the season of birth, which no shortage reverses; trunk-trail foraging with site fidelity and recruitment; seed storage, opening and germination in the chambers, which is what feeds the larvae; daily weather from the climate normals of the study site, with drought years; nuptial flights after heavy rain; corpse removal; alarm at a disturbance on the foraging ground; and annual nest relocation, in which the store and then the brood are carried along the trail to a new nest the colony digs.

Every value in the model is tagged as measured in this species, borrowed from another ant, or invented, with its source, in a single parameter file. The model is deterministic: one seeded stream per system and a fixed one-minute timestep, so a seed reproduces a run bit for bit in the browser and in Node, which a test pins. A study writes a methods report listing the invented values the results rest on and the acceptance tests the model fails.

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NearshoreABM simulates whether a region captures the production linkages that nearshoring makes available, or fails to capture them because physical infrastructure and credit supply bind first.

The model runs over the 32 Mexican states at quarterly frequency. Multinational anchor firms decide whether to enter and where to locate, following Melitz selection on heterogeneous productivity under trade-policy uncertainty. Domestic supplier firms decide whether to formalise and whether to invest in quality, and may or may not obtain a contract with an anchor. A banking sector allocates a finite regional credit supply according to observed default risk, serving anchor firms before suppliers.

Electricity and water capacity enter production as non-linear congestion penalties with an engineering-based threshold, so the response of output to demand growth is discontinuous rather than proportional: below the threshold there is no penalty at all, between threshold and capacity the penalty grows quadratically, and above capacity it decays exponentially. Congestion is rivalrous within the quarter, which makes the order of production economically meaningful rather than incidental.

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The purpose of this agent-based model is to compare different variants of crowdworking in a general way, so that the obtained results are independent of specific details of the crowdworking platform. It features many adjustable parameters that can be used to calibrate the model to empirical data, but also when not calibrated it yields essential results about crowdworking in general.
Agents compete for contracts on a virtual crowdworking platform. Each agent is defined by various properties like qualification and income expectation. Agents that are unable to turn a profit have a chance to quit the crowdworking platform and new crowdworkers can replace them. Thus the model has features of an evolutionary process, filtering out the ill suited agents, and generating a realistic distribution of agents from an initially random one. To simulate a stable system, the amount of contracts issued per day can be set constant, as well as the number of crowdworkers. If one is interested in a dynamically changing platform, the simulation can also be initialized in a way that increases or decreases the number of crowdworkers or number of contracts over time. Thus, a large variety of scenarios can be investigated.

We develop an agent-based model (U-TRANS) to simulate the transition of an abstract city under an industrial revolution. By coupling the labour and housing markets, we propose a holistic framework that incorporates the key interacting factors and micro processes during the transition. Using U-TRANS, we look at five urban transition scenarios: collapse, weak recovery, transition, enhanced training and global recruit, and find the model is able to generate patterns observed in the real world. For example, We find that poor neighbourhoods benefit the most from growth in the new industry, whereas the rich neighbourhoods do better than the rest when the growth is slow or the situation deteriorates. We also find a (subtle) trade-off between growth and equality. The strategy to recruit a large number of skilled workers globally will lead to higher growth in GDP, population and human capital, but it will also entail higher inequality and market volatility, and potentially create a divide between the local and international workers. The holistic framework developed in this paper will help us better understand urban transition and detect early signals in the process. It can also be used as a test-bed for policy and growth strategies to help a city during a major economic and technological revolution.