Why do career outcomes in organizations follow highly skewed distributions when the individual traits presumed to drive success — competence, effort, and social skill — are approximately normally distributed in the population? This agent-based model investigates the relative contributions of individual attributes versus random events (“luck”) to career outcomes in hierarchically structured organizations.

The model places 500 agents in a five-level pyramid-shaped organization over 80 six-month evaluation periods (40 simulated years). Each agent is characterized by four attributes drawn from normal distributions at initialization: competence, effort, social skill, and adaptability. In each period, agents may encounter stochastic career events (good or bad projects, supportive or poor managers, market booms or busts), which modify their performance and visibility scores. Promotion decisions are made competitively when vacancies arise at higher levels, using a weighted combination of recent performance, accumulated visibility, network position, and tenure. Social connections form and decay through a proximity-based model influenced by agents’ social skills.

The model extends the talent-versus-luck framework of Pluchino et al. (2018) in four substantive directions: (1) it embeds agents in a hierarchical organization with finite positions at each level, making promotion a zero-sum competition rather than an abstract encounter with random events; (2) it represents individual differences along four independent attribute dimensions rather than a single talent score; (3) it incorporates dynamic social network formation that mediates access to career-relevant opportunities; and (4) it implements the Peter Principle mechanism through which promoted agents must acquire competence appropriate to their new role.

…

SERDUX-MARCIM simulates the propagation of a cyberattack over the computational network of an organization in the maritime sector, at the strategic level of decision-making. It is the instantiation of ABM-MARCIM, the agent-based model of the MARCIM framework for the modeling and simulation of maritime cyberdefense.

Every computational asset of the target organization – servers, endpoints, routers, gateways, vessel systems, radars – is an agent that occupies one of six states at each time step: Susceptible, Exposed, Resistant, Degraded, Unavailable or Destroyed, the initials of which give the model its name. The states Degraded, Unavailable and Destroyed are associated with the D5 cyberattack effects (disrupt, degrade, deny, destroy, deceive) as a function of the degree and the duration of the attack. Thirteen transitions between states are admissible.

Unlike a conventional agent-based model, the local update function is not an individual behavioral rule. It is a system of six ordinary differential equations with eight time-dependent transition rates – propagation, cyberattack (degraded), cyberattack (unavailable), cyberattack (destroyed), recovery, sanitation, loss of resistance, and unavailability by other causes. The values of those rates derive from the capabilities of the target organization, the capabilities of the attacker, and the degree and duration of the cyberattack, computed through a cyber risk approach aligned with the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology, the ISACA categorization of security controls and the IMO Guidelines on Maritime Cyber Risk Management.

…

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.

…

Diversity has become a defining feature of most Western societies, where boundaries of membership extend beyond ethnicity to encompass multiple intersecting categories, increasing the complexity of social integration. The aim of this model is to adapt the classical Schelling model of spatial segregation to this context and to identify mechanisms that may generate the hybrid segregation patterns where individuals are segregated from out-groups along one dimension while remaining integrated along others.

We extend the Schelling model using a discrete choice framework that incorporates dominant and secondary preferences among agents from two ethnic groups. Liberal agents prioritize cross-ethnic shared values over ethnicity, whereas conservative agents prioritize ethnic membership over shared values, although both retain some preference for the secondary dimension. The model is designed to explore how heterogeneous preferences and intersecting group memberships interact under different group compositions and initial distributions.

Meridian is a deterministic artificial world in which autonomous LLM scientist agents run
experiments on instruments, exchange letters, and maintain explicit probabilistic beliefs, while
a physical constant changes covertly mid-run. The true state is known only to the simulator, so
whether anyone notices becomes a measurement rather than an interpretation.

The platform separates three things that are usually confounded: what could have been known from
…

An agent-based model of how public space conditions shape the collective formation of local sports communities in high-mobility cities. A small gathering is already exercising in an abstract, systematically configurable public space; the model asks how strangers join them and whether the loose gathering consolidates into a stable community. Three conditions are manipulated, each acting through exactly one channel: spatial legibility governs whether a passer-by notices the activity, routine compatibility governs whether a member attends in a given week, and social anchor availability governs how much one episode of co-presence builds a tie. Ties carry a continuous strength with two thresholds, so that relationships of differing strength cross their thresholds at different condition levels. Because the model does not represent the origin of an activity, dissolution is irreversible and survival is a clean binary outcome. Across 32,790 runs in eight experiments the model yields two well separated thresholds along routine compatibility — one for survival, one for consolidation — with a wide band between them in which a space is used continuously but no community forms. The tie submodel is adapted from Jin, Girvan and Newman (2001) and verified against it by docking. Robustness is established against the seeded gathering, the pre-existing social network, a joint ±20 per cent perturbation of the behavioural parameters, and the parameters of the tie machinery.

An empirical-response agent-based model of how many personalized feeds execute a shared low-exposure creator-discovery objective. Built from the KuaiRec dataset: the big interaction matrix initializes a transparent rank-8 matrix-factorization platform learner and the activity schedule, while the near-complete small matrix returns observed viewing responses only after a user-video pair is exposed. Four exploration policies (synchronous low-exposure targeting, uniform exploration, per-user random tie-breaking, capacity-balanced coordination) are compared over 28 rounds at a nominal 10% exploration budget, across 30 paired seeds (core) and 10 paired seeds (bias-only probe), with slot-level redundancy, cross-user collision, and coverage diagnostics.
This release accompanies an anonymised manuscript under review at the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

The model represents 1,411 users, 3,327 videos, 2,031 authors, and an adaptive platform over 28 discrete rounds derived from the KuaiRec big-matrix activity calendar. Exploration policies differ only in how a fixed 10% slot budget is allocated; all policies share the opportunity schedule, response oracle, initial checkpoints, and online update rule.

Archive contents: analysis pipeline scripts (01-16), frozen machine-readable protocols with input hashes, initial model checkpoints, aggregate result tables, the complete ODD protocol record, and publication figures. Raw KuaiRec files are not redistributed; obtain them from the official dataset repository and verify against the input hashes in data_contract/. Row-level oracle tables are excluded by design.
…

This model tests whether local housing supply elasticity governs crash severity inside a single metropolitan housing market. Saiz (2010) established that across US metros, regions constrained by geography and regulation experience deeper boom-bust cycles than flexible ones. That finding is routinely applied downward to neighborhoods and ZIP codes as though the mechanism scaled without qualification.

The empirical record for the Washington DC and Northern Virginia region says it does not. Across 84 ZIP codes, measured supply elasticity ranges from 0.35 to 4.95 with a median of 1.21. The worst single-year price decline between 2007 and 2012 averaged 9.6 percent in constrained ZIP codes and 9.0 percent in flexible ones, a gap that cannot be distinguished from noise. Wide variation in the proposed cause, no meaningful separation in the proposed effect.

The model embeds households, houses and a metro-wide credit condition in the real ZIP geography of the region using three GIS layers and an empirical price panel. Local elasticity governs construction, exactly as theory predicts. Prices are driven by a shared macro drift schedule and, under the credit-amplified mode, by a leverage cycle with a financial accelerator and a deviation penalty. The design question is whether those shared forces are sufficient to override local supply differences at the sub-metropolitan scale.

…

The Oussa Pañn model is an agent-based representation of the social-ecological system embedded in the Oussa Pañn role-playing game. It represents shellfish harvesters making individual livelihood decisions between harvesting renewable shellfish resources from mudflats and engaging in alternative income-generating activities in a village. The model was developed to (i) compare simulated and observed game trajectories, (ii) verify the internal consistency of recorded game data, and (iii) provide a baseline against which observed player behaviour can be compared, notably through random decision-making scenarios.