Quality uncertainty and market failure: an interactive model to conduct classroom experiments

We demonstrate how a simple model of community associated Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) can be easily constructed by leveraging the statecharts and ReLogo capabilities in Repast Simphony.

System Narrative
How do rebel groups control territory and engage with the local economy during civil war? Charles Tilly’s seminal War and State Making as Organized Crime (1985) posits that the process of waging war and providing governance resembles that of a protection racket, in which aspiring governing groups will extort local populations in order to gain power, and civilians or businesses will pay in order to ensure their own protection. As civil war research increasingly probes the mechanisms that fuel local disputes and the origination of violence, we develop an agent-based simulation model to explore the economic relationship of rebel groups with local populations, using extortion racket interactions to explain the dynamics of rebel fighting, their impact on the economy, and the importance of their economic base of support. This analysis provides insights for understanding the causes and byproducts of rebel competition in present-day conflicts, such as the cases of South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

Model Description
The model defines two object types: RebelGroup and Enterprise. A RebelGroup is a group that competes for power in a system of anarchy, in which there is effectively no government control. An Enterprise is a local civilian-level actor that conducts business in this environment, whose objective is to make a profit. In this system, a RebelGroup may choose to extort money from Enterprises in order to support its fighting efforts. It can extract payments from an Enterprise, which fears for its safety if it does not pay. This adds some amount of money to the RebelGroup’s resources, and they can return to extort the same Enterprise again. The RebelGroup can also choose to loot the Enterprise instead. This results in gaining all of the Enterprise wealth, but prompts the individual Enterprise to flee, or leave the model. This reduces the available pool of Enterprises available to the RebelGroup for extortion. Following these interactions the RebelGroup can choose to AllocateWealth, or pay its rebel fighters. Depending on the value of its available resources, it can add more rebels or expel some of those which it already has, changing its size. It can also choose to expand over new territory, or effectively increase its number of potential extorting Enterprises. As a response to these dynamics, an Enterprise can choose to Report expansion to another RebelGroup, which results in fighting between the two groups. This system shows how, faced with economic choices, RebelGroups and Enterprises make decisions in war that impact conflict and violence outcomes.

This model is a minimal agent-based model (ABM) of green consumption and market tipping dynamics in a stylised two-firm economy. It is designed as an existence proof to illustrate how weak individual preferences, when combined with habit formation, social influence, and firm price adaptation, can generate non-linear transitions (tipping points) in market outcomes.

The economy consists of:
1) Two firms, each supplying a differentiated consumption bundle that differs in its fixed green share (one relatively greener, one less green).
2) Many households, each consuming a unit mass per period and allocating consumption between the two firms.

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This is an agent-based model designed to explore the evolution of cooperation under changes in resources availability for a given population

The Price Evolution with Expectations model provides the opportunity to explore the question of non-equilibrium market dynamics, and how and under which conditions an economic system converges to the classically defined economic equilibrium. To accomplish this, we bring together two points of view of the economy; the classical perspective of general equilibrium theory and an evolutionary perspective, in which the current development of the economic system determines the possibilities for further evolution.

The Price Evolution with Expectations model consists of a representative firm producing no profit but producing a single good, which we call sugar, and a representative household which provides labour to the firm and purchases sugar.The model explores the evolutionary dynamics whereby the firm does not initially know the household demand but eventually this demand and thus the correct price for sugar given the household’s optimal labour.

The model can be run in one of two ways; the first does not include money and the second uses money such that the firm and/or the household have an endowment that can be spent or saved. In either case, the household has preferences for leisure and consumption and a demand function relating sugar and price, and the firm has a production function and learns the household demand over a set number of time steps using either an endogenous or exogenous learning algorithm. The resulting equilibria, or fixed points of the system, may or may not match the classical economic equilibrium.

This is a generic sub-model of animal territory formation. It is meant to be a reusable building block, but not in the plug-and-play sense, as amendments are likely to be needed depending on the species and region. The sub-model comprises a grid of cells, reprenting the landscape. Each cell has a “quality” value, which quantifies the amount of resources provided for a territory owner, for example a tiger. “Quality” could be prey density, shelter, or just space. Animals are located randomly in the landscape and add grid cells to their intial cell until the sum of the quality of all their cells meets their needs. If a potential new cell to be added is owned by another animal, competition takes place. The quality values are static, and the model does not include demography, i.e. mortality, mating, reproduction. Also, movement within a territory is not represented.

The Pampas Model is an Agent-Based Model intended to explore the dynamics of structural and land use changes in agricultural systems of the Argentine Pampas in response to climatic, technological economic, and political drivers.

STiMUS (Stigmergic–Mutualistic IMOI Model) is an agent-based model of teamwork in socio-technical systems where contributors collaborate through shared digital artefacts — wiki pages, code files, issue tickets, project cards, Scratch projects — represented as patches in a NetLogo world. The model integrates two coordination mechanisms. Stigmergy is indirect coordination through traces left in a shared environment: each edit deposits a pheromone that diffuses to neighbouring patches and evaporates over time, so recent activity attracts further contributions. Mutualism is a reciprocal benefit loop in which valuable, well-maintained artefacts raise contributor motivation and shared understanding, while motivated contributors improve artefacts.

Contributors (turtles of the contributor breed) carry individual state: skill, motivation, shared-mental-model, specialty, benefit-gain, and an explicit-mode flag. At each tick every contributor selects a target artefact with an ant-colony-optimization-style rule weighing the artefact’s pheromone, incompleteness (1 - completeness), resource-value, and topic match between specialty and the artefact’s topic-tag; with probability p-explicit it instead takes the patch with the highest maintenance-need, modelling explicit task assignment. Each edit increases pheromone, quality, completeness and reuse-count, raises resource-value, lowers maintenance-need, and appends the editor to the artefact’s edit-authors list. When the previous last-editor-id differs from the current editor, the Edit Succession Ratio rises, the editor’s shared-mental-model grows, and a co-editing link is created — operationalising the idea that repeated cross-author succession on the same artefact builds shared understanding. Contributors’ motivation is updated from the benefit drawn from the visited artefact.

Each patch maintains a stigmergic layer (pheromone, quality, completeness, recentness, last-editor-id, edit-count, edit-authors) and a mutualistic layer (resource-value, reuse-count, maintenance-need, topic-tag), plus task flags (is-task?, task-complexity). Global monitors report the Edit Succession Ratio (ESR = cross-author-edits / total-edits, and an alternative esr-value = share of edited patches with more than one distinct author), mean-quality, mean-resource-value, a mutualism-index averaging contributor benefit and resource value, coediting-density (network density of the co-editing graph), active-pages-share, and task-completion-rate. The model logs every edit as a bipartite edge (tick, author_id, pageid, specialty, topic_tag, quality), exportable to CSV.

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Netlogo model that shows how the cooling process determines the quality of a solution in simulated annealing using Metropolis algorithm.