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

We expose RA agent-based model of the opinion and tolerance dynamics in artificial societies. The formal mathematical model is based on the ideas of Social Influence, Social Judgment, and Social Identity theories.

The purpose of the model is to simulate the spatial dynamics of potato late blight to analyse whether resistant varieties can be used effectively for sustainable disease control. The model represents an agricultural landscape with potato fields and data of a Dutch agricultural region is used as input for the model. We simulated potato production, disease spread and pathogen evolution during the growing season (April to September) for 36 years. Since late blight development and crop growth is weather dependent, measured weather data is used as model input. A susceptible and late blight resistant potato variety are distinguished. The resistant variety has a potentially lower yield but cannot get infected with the disease. However, during the growing season virulent spores can emerge as a result of mutations during spore production. This new virulent strain is able to infect the resistant fields, resulting in resistance breakdown. The model shows how disease severity, resistance durability and potato yield are affected by the fraction of fields across a landscape with a disease-resistant potato variety.

TRUE GRASP (Tree Recruitment Under Exotic GRAsses in a Savanna-Pineland)
is a socio-ecological agent-based model (ABM) and role playing game (RPG) for farmers and other stakeholders involved in rural landscape planning.

The purpose of this model is to allow actors to explore the individual and combined effects - as well as tradeoffs - of three methods of controlling exotic grasses in pine savannas: fire, weeding, and grazing cattle.

Design of TRUE GRASP is based on 3 years of socio-ecological fieldwork in a human-induced pine savanna in La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve (SBR) in the Mexican state of Chiapas. In this savanna, farmers harvest resin from Pinus oocarpa, which is used to produce turpentine and other products. However, long term persistence of this activity is jeopardized by low tree recruitment due to exotic tall grass cover in the forest understory (see Braasch et al., 2017). The TRUE GRASP model provides the user with different management strategies for controlling exotic grass cover and avoiding possible regime shifts, which in the case of the SBR would jeopardize resin harvesting.

This is an initial exploratory exercise done for the class @ http://thiagomarzagao.com/teaching/ipea/ Text available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04429v1
The program:
Reads output from an ABM model and its parameters’ configuration
Creates a socioeconomic optimal output based on two ABM results of the modelers choice
Organizes the data as X and Y matrices
Trains some Machine Learning algorithms
…

Simulation-Framework to study the governance of complex, network-like sociotechnical systems by means of ABM. Agents’ behaviour is based on a sociological model of action. A set of basic governance mechanisms helps to conduct first experiments.

This model represents informal information transmission networks among medieval Genoese investors used to inform each other about cheating merchants they employed as part of long-distance trade operations.

This is an agent-based model that allows to test alternative designs for three model components. The model was built using the LUDAS design strategy, while each alternative is in line with the strategy. Using the model, it can be shown that alternative designs, though built on the same strategy, lead to different land-use patterns over time.

It is very difficult to model a sustainable intergenerational biophysical/financial economy. ModEco NLG is one of a series of models exploring the dynamics of sustainable economics – PSoup, ModEco, EiLab, OamLab, MppLab, TpLab, CmLab.

Swidden Farming is designed to explore the dynamics of agricultural land management strategies.