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.

Purpose of the model is to perform a “virtual experiment” to test the predator satiation hypothesis, advanced in literature to explain the mast seeding phenomenon.

MoPAgrIB model simulates the movement of cultivated patches in a savannah vegetation mosaic ; how they move and relocate through the landscape, depending on farming practices, population growth, social rules and vegetation growth.

This is a simulation model of an intelligent agent that has the objective to learn sustainable management of a renewable resource, such as a fish stock.

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 Holmestrand model is an epidemiological agent-based model. Its aim is to test hypotheses related to how the social and physical environment of a residential school for children with disabilities might influence the spread of an infectious disease epidemic among students and staff. Annual reports for the Holmestrand School for the Deaf (Norway) are the primary sources of inspiration for the modeled school, with additional insights drawn from other archival records for schools for children with disabilities in early 20th century Norway and data sources for the 1918 influenza pandemic. The model environment consists of a simplified boarding school that includes residential spaces for students and staff, classrooms, a dining room, common room, and an outdoor area. Students and staff engage in activities reflecting hourly schedules suggested by school reports. By default, a random staff member is selected as the first case and is infected with disease. Subsequent transmission is determined by agent movement and interactions between susceptible and infectious pairs.

The model is suitable to investigate the effects of different characteristics of apprenticeship programmes both in historical and contemporary societies. The model is built considering five societies, using an agent-based simulation model, we identified six main characteristics which impact the success of an apprenticeship programme in a society, which we measured by considering three parameters, namely the number of skilled agents produced by the apprenticeships, programme completion, and the contribution of programmes in the Gross Domestic Income (GDI) of the society. We investigate different definitions for success of an apprenticeship and some hypothetical societies to test some common beliefs about apprenticeships performance. The model also shows the number of unemployed agents given their work-based skills, wages, and the number of small and large companies who participate in training agents. The model enables exploring the impact of parameters, such as initial wages and the number of training years, along with the stated policies on the system.

An ABM of changes in individuals’ lifestyles which considers their
evolving behavioural choices. Individuals have a set of environmental behavioural traits that spread through a fixed Watts–Strogatz graph via social interactions with their neighbours. These exchanges are mediated by transmission biases informing from whom an individual learns and
how much attention is paid. The influence of individuals on each other is a function of their similarity in environmental identity, where we represent environmental identity computationally by aggregating past agent attitudes towards multiple environmentally related behaviours. To perform a behaviour, agents must both have
a sufficiently positive attitude toward a behaviour and overcome a corresponding threshold. This threshold
structure, where the desire to perform a behaviour does not equal its enactment, allows for a lack of coherence
between attitudes and actual emissions. This leads to a disconnect between what people believe and what
…

This model is to simulate and compare the admission effects of 3 school matching mechanisms, serial dictatorship, Boston mechanism, and Chinese Parallel, under different settings of information released.

The model simulates the decisions of residents and a water authority to respond to socio-hydrological hazards. Residents from neighborhoods are located in a landscape with topographic complexity and two problems: water scarcity in the peripheral neighborhoods at high altitude and high risk of flooding in the lowlands, at the core of the city. The role of the water authority is to decide where investments in infrastructure should be allocated to reduce the risk to water scarcity and flooding events in the city, and these decisions are made via a multi-objective site selection procedure. This procedure accounts for the interdependencies and feedback between the urban landscape and a policy scenario that defines the importance, or priorities, that the authority places on four criteria.
Neighborhoods respond to the water authority decisions by protesting against the lack of investment and the level of exposure to water scarcity and flooding. Protests thus simulate a form of feedback between local-level outcomes (flooding and water scarcity) and higher-level decision-making. Neighborhoods at high altitude are more likely to be exposed to water scarcity and lack infrastructure, whereas neighborhoods in the lowlands tend to suffer from recurrent flooding. The frequency of flooding is also a function of spatially uniform rainfall events. Likewise, neighborhoods at the periphery of the urban landscape lack infrastructure and suffer from chronic risk of water scarcity.
The model simulates the coupling between the decision-making processes of institutional actors, socio-political processes and infrastructure-related hazards. In the documentation, we describe details of the implementation in NetLogo, the description of the procedures, scheduling, and the initial conditions of the landscape and the neighborhoods.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1414052, CNH: The Dynamics of Multi-Scalar Adaptation in Megacities (PI Hallie Eakin).