The Friendship Field model aims at modelling friendship formation based on three factors: Extraversion, Resemblance and Status, where social interaction is motivated by the Social Battery. Social Battery is one’s energy and motivation to engage in social contact. Since social contact is crucial for friendship formation, the model included Social Battery to affect social interactions. To our best knowledge, Social Battery is a yet unintroduced concept in research while it is a dynamic factor influencing the social interaction besides one’s characteristics. Extraverts’ Social Batteries charge while interacting and exhaust while being alone. Introverts’ Social Batteries charge while being alone and exhaust while interacting. The aim of the model is to illustrate the concept of Social Battery. Moreover, the Friendship Field shows patterns regarding Extraversion, Resemblance and Status including the mere-exposure effect and friendship by similarity. For the implementation of Status, Kemper’s status-power theory is used. The concept of Social Battery is also linked to Kemper’s theory on the organism as reference group. By running the model for a year (3 interactions moments per day), the friendship dynamics over time can be studied.

We presented the model at the Social Simulation Conference 2022.

This model aims to explore how gambling-like behavior can emerge in loot box spending within gaming communities. A loot box is a purchasable mystery box that randomly awards the player a series of in-game items. Since the contents of the box are largely up to chance, many players can fall into a compulsion loop of purchasing, as the fear of missing out and belief in the gambler’s fallacy allow one to rationalize repeated purchases, especially when one compares their own luck to others. To simulate this behavior, this model generates players in different network structures to observe how factors such as network connectivity, a player’s internal decision making strategy, or even common manipulations games use these days may influence a player’s transactions.

This is a gender differentiation model in terms of reputations, prestige and self-esteem (presented in the paper https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236840). The model is based on the influence function of the Leviathan model (Deffuant, Carletti, Huet 2013 and Huet and Deffuant 2017) considering two groups.

This agent-based model studies how inequalities can be explained by the difference of open-mindness between two groups of interacting agents. We consider agents having an opinion/esteem about each other and about themselves. During dyadic meetings, agents change their respective opinion about each other and possibly about other agents they gossip about, with a noisy perception of the opinions of their interlocutor. Highly valued agents are more influential in such encounters. We study an heterogeneous population of two different groups: one more open to influence of others, taking less into account their perceived difference of esteem, called L; a second one less prone to it, called S, who designed the credibility they give to others strongly based on how higher or lower valued than themselves they perceive them.

We show that a mixed population always turns in favor to some agents belonging to the group of less open-minded agents S, and harms the other group: (1) the average group self-opinion or reputation of S is always better than the one of L; (2) the higher rank in terms of reputation are more frequently occupied by the S agents while the L agents occupy more the bottom rank; (3) the properties of the dynamics of differentiation between the two groups are similar to the properties of the glass ceiling effect proposed by Cotter et al (2001).

The purpose of the model is to explore how processes associated with compliance across different fishery actors’ social groups interplay with their acceptance of a fishery intervention, herein periodic closures of a small-scale octopus fishery. The model agents, entities and processes are designed based on stylized facts from literature and expert workshops on periodic closures in the Western Indian Ocean region, as well as fieldwork from Zanzibari villages that have implemented periodic octopus closures. The model is designed for scientists and decision-makers that are interested in understanding the complex interplay between fishers from different social groups, herein foot fisher men, foot fisher women and male skin divers or free divers within the periodic closure of an octopus species. Including various actions resulting from the restrictions, that is - opportunities that may be presented from restricting fishing in certain areas and during certain times. We are soon publishing an updated model with individual octopuses and their movement behaviors.

The study goes back to a model created in the 1990s which successfully tried to replicate the changes of the percentages of female teachers among the teaching staff in high schools (“Gymnasien”) in the German federal state of Rheinland-Pfalz. The current version allows for additional validation and calibration of the model and is accompanied with the empirical data against which the model is tested and with an analysis program especially designed to perform the analyses in the most recent journal article.

The integrated and spatially-explicit ABM, called DIReC (Demography, Industry and Residential Choice), has been developed for Aberdeen City and the surrounding Aberdeenshire (Ge, Polhill, Craig, & Liu, 2018). The model includes demographic (individual and household) models, housing infrastructure and occupancy, neighbourhood quality and evolution, employment and labour market, business relocation, industrial structure, income distribution and macroeconomic indicators. DIReC includes a detailed spatial housing model, basing preference models on house attributes and multi-dimensional neighbourhood qualities (education, crime, employment etc.).
The dynamic ABM simulates the interactions between individuals, households, the labour market, businesses and services, neighbourhoods and economic structures. It is empirically grounded using multiple data sources, such as income and gender-age distribution across industries, neighbourhood attributes, business locations, and housing transactions. It has been used to study the impact of economic shocks and structural changes, such as the crash of oil price in 2014 (the Aberdeen economy heavily relies on the gas and oil sector) and the city’s transition from resource-based to a green economy (Ge, Polhill, Craig, & Liu, 2018).

Violence against women occurs predominantly in the family and domestic context. The COVID-19 pandemic led Brazil to recommend and, at times, impose social distancing, with the partial closure of economic activities, schools, and restrictions on events and public services. Preliminary evidence shows that intense co- existence increases domestic violence, while social distancing measures may have prevented access to public services and networks, information, and help. We propose an agent-based model (ABM), called VIDA, to illustrate and examine multi-causal factors that influence events that generate violence. A central part of the model is the multi-causal stress indicator, created as a probability trigger of domestic violence occurring within the family environment. Two experimental design tests were performed: (a) absence or presence of the deterrence system of domestic violence against women and measures to increase social distancing. VIDA presents comparative results for metropolitan regions and neighbourhoods considered in the experiments. Results suggest that social distancing measures, particularly those encouraging staying at home, may have increased domestic violence against women by about 10%. VIDA suggests further that more populated areas have comparatively fewer cases per hundred thousand women than less populous capitals or rural areas of urban concentrations. This paper contributes to the literature by formalising, to the best of our knowledge, the first model of domestic violence through agent-based modelling, using empirical detailed socioeconomic, demographic, educational, gender, and race data at the intraurban level (census sectors).

In Western countries, the distribution of relative incomes within marriages tends to be skewed in a remarkable way. Husbands usually do not only earn more than their female partners, but there also is a striking discontinuity in their relative contributions to the household income at the 50/50 point: many wives contribute just a bit less than or as much as their husbands, but few contribute more. Our model makes it possible to study a social mechanism that might create this ‘cliff’: women and men differ in their incomes (even outside marriage) and this may differentially affect their abilities to find similar- or higher-income partners. This may ultimately contribute to inequalities within the households that form. The model and associated files make it possible to assess the merit of this mechanism in 27 European countries.

Status-power dynamics on a playground, resulting in a status landscape with a gender status gap. Causal: individual (beauty, kindness, power), binary (rough-and-tumble; has-been-nice) or prior popularity (status). Cultural: acceptability of fighting.

An empirical ABM of smallholder decisions in times of drought stress.