According to the philosopher of science K. Popper “All life is problem solving”. Genetic algorithms aim to leverage Darwinian selection, a fundamental mechanism of biological evolution, so as to tackle various engineering challenges.
Flibs’NFarol is an Agent Based Model that embodies a genetic algorithm applied to the inherently ill-defined “El Farol Bar” problem. Within this context, a group of agents operates under bounded rationality conditions, giving rise to processes of self-organization involving, in the first place, efficiency in the exploitation of available resources. Over time, the attention of scholars has shifted to equity in resource distribution, as well. Nowadays, the problem is recognized as paradigmatic within studies of complex evolutionary systems.
Flibs’NFarol provides a platform to explore and evaluate factors influencing self-organized efficiency and fairness. The model represents agents as finite automata, known as “flibs,” and offers flexibility in modifying the number of internal flibs states, which directly affects their behaviour patterns and, ultimately, the diversity within populations and the complexity of the system.

This is a simulation of an insurance market where the premium moves according to the balance between supply and demand. In this model, insurers set their supply with the aim of maximising their expected utility gain while operating under imperfect information about both customer demand and underlying risk distributions.

There are seven types of insurer strategies. One type follows a rational strategy within the bounds of imperfect information. The other six types also seek to maximise their utility gain, but base their market expectations on a chartist strategy. Under this strategy, market premium is extrapolated from trends based on past insurance prices. This is subdivided according to whether the insurer is trend following or a contrarian (counter-trend), and further depending on whether the trend is estimated from short-term, medium-term, or long-term data.

Customers are modelled as a whole and allocated between insurers according to available supply. Customer demand is calculated according to a logit choice model based on the expected utility gain of purchasing insurance for an average customer versus the expected utility gain of non-purchase.

We introduce a model of prediction markets that uses opinion dynamics as its underlying mechanism for price formation. We base the opinion dynamics on the Deffuant model of bounded rationality. We have used this model to show that price formation in prediction markets can be robustly explained by opinion dynamics, and that the model can also explain phase transitions depending on just two parameters.

This project was developed during the Santa Fe course Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling 2022. The origin is a Cellular Automata (CA) model to simulate human interactions that happen in the real world, from Rubens and Oliveira (2009). These authors used a market research with real people in two different times: one at time zero and the second at time zero plus 4 months (longitudinal market research). They developed an agent-based model whose initial condition was inherited from the results of the first market research response values and evolve it to simulate human interactions with Agent-Based Modeling that led to the values of the second market research, without explicitly imposing rules. Then, compared results of the model with the second market research. The model reached 73.80% accuracy.
In the same way, this project is an Exploratory ABM project that models individuals in a closed society whose behavior depends upon the result of interaction with two neighbors within a radius of interaction, one on the relative “right” and other one on the relative “left”. According to the states (colors) of neighbors, a given cellular automata rule is applied, according to the value set in Chooser. Five states were used here and are defined as levels of quality perception, where red (states 0 and 1) means unhappy, state 3 is neutral and green (states 3 and 4) means happy.
There is also a message passing algorithm in the social network, to analyze the flow and spread of information among nodes. Both the cellular automaton and the message passing algorithms were developed using the Python extension. The model also uses extensions csv and arduino.

The BASAR model aims to investigate different approaches to describe small-scale farmers’ decision-making in the context of diversified agroforestry adoption in rural Rwanda. Thereby, it compares random behaviour with perfect rationality (non-discounted and discounted utility maximization), bounded rationality (satisficing and fast and frugal decision tree heuristics), Theory of Planned Behaviour, and a probabilistic regression-based approach. It is aimed at policy-makers, extension agents, and cooperatives to better understand how rural farmers decide about implementing innovative agricultural practices such as agroforestry and at modelers to support them in selecting an approach to represent human decision-making in ABMs of Social-Ecological Systems. The overall objective is to identify a suitable approach to describe human decision-making and therefore improve forecasts of adoption rates and support the development and implementation of interventions that aim to raise low adoption rates.

A series of studies show the applicability of the NK model in the crowdsourcing research, but it also exposes a problem that the application of the NK model is not tightly integrated with crowdsourcing process, which leads to lack of a basic crowdsourcing simulation model. Accordingly, by introducing interaction relationship among task decisions to define three tasks of different structure: local task, small-world task and random task, and introducing bounded rationality and its two dimensions are taken into account: bounded rationality level that used to distinguish industry types and bounded rationality bias that used to differentiate professional users and ordinary users, an agent-based model that simulates the problem-solving process of tournament-based crowdsourcing is constructed by combining the NK fitness landscapes and the crowdsourcing framework of “Task-Crowd-Process-Evaluation”.

A series of studies show the applicability of the NK model in the crowdsourcing research, but it also exposes a problem that the application of the NK model is not tightly integrated with crowdsourcing process, which leads to lack of a basic crowdsourcing simulation model. Accordingly, by introducing interaction relationship among task decisions to define three tasks of different structure: local task, small-world task and random task, and introducing bounded rationality and its two dimensions are taken into account: bounded rationality level that used to distinguish industry types and bounded rationality bias that used to differentiate professional users and ordinary users, an agent-based model that simulates the problem-solving process of tournament-based crowdsourcing is constructed by combining the NK fitness landscapes and the crowdsourcing framework of “Task-Crowd-Process-Evaluation”.

Comparing impact of alternative behavioral theories in a simple social-ecological system.

The simulation model LAMDA investigates the influences of varying cognitive abilities of the decision maker on the truth-inducing effect of the Groves mechanism. Bounded rationality concepts are represented by information states and learning models.

This model is designed to investigate the impact of alternative policy approaches and changing land tenure dynamics on farmer adoption of conservation practices intended to increase the water quality.