204,825 research outputs found
Accessing Complex Systems: An Introduction to Agent-Based Models
Alicia Uribe-McGuire is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests focus on American Political Institutions with a particular emphasis on the United States Judiciary. Her research explores the intersection between the judiciary and other political actors or bodies and uses both formal and quantitative methods.The world we live in is complex. Individuals change, evolve, and grow as they experience the world and others around them. Agent-based and computational models can help us account for the complexity and dynamics of interactions among individuals. This seminar will include an introduction to agent-based models, explore some prominent examples, and provide a brief primer on how to approach these models
A generic model of dyadic social relationships
We introduce a model of dyadic social interactions and establish its
correspondence with relational models theory (RMT), a theory of human social
relationships. RMT posits four elementary models of relationships governing
human interactions, singly or in combination: Communal Sharing, Authority
Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. To these are added the limiting
cases of asocial and null interactions, whereby people do not coordinate with
reference to any shared principle. Our model is rooted in the observation that
each individual in a dyadic interaction can do either the same thing as the
other individual, a different thing or nothing at all. To represent these three
possibilities, we consider two individuals that can each act in one out of
three ways toward the other: perform a social action X or Y, or alternatively
do nothing. We demonstrate that the relationships generated by this model
aggregate into six exhaustive and disjoint categories. We propose that four of
these categories match the four relational models, while the remaining two
correspond to the asocial and null interactions defined in RMT. We generalize
our results to the presence of N social actions. We infer that the four
relational models form an exhaustive set of all possible dyadic relationships
based on social coordination. Hence, we contribute to RMT by offering an answer
to the question of why there could exist just four relational models. In
addition, we discuss how to use our representation to analyze data sets of
dyadic social interactions, and how social actions may be valued and matched by
the agents
Interactions of social, terrestrial, and marine sub-systems in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Galapagos is often cited as an example of the conflicts that are emerging between resource conservation and economic development in island ecosystems, as the pressures associated with tourism threaten nature, including the iconic and emblematic species, unique terrestrial landscapes, and special marine environments. In this paper, two projects are described that rely upon dynamic systems models and agent-based models to examine human–environment interactions. We use a theoretical context rooted in complexity theory to guide the development of our models that are linked to social–ecological dynamics. The goal of this paper is to describe key elements, relationships, and processes to inform and enhance our understanding of human–environment interactions in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. By formalizing our knowledge of how systems operate and the manner in which key elements are linked in coupled human–natural systems, we specify rules, relationships, and rates of exchange between social and ecological features derived through statistical functions and/or functions specified in theory or practice. The processes described in our models also have practical applications in that they emphasize how political policies generate different human responses and model outcomes, many detrimental to the social–ecological sustainability of the Galapagos Islands
Opinion dynamics and decision of vote in bipolar political systems
A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is
proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third
political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision
strongly depends on global effects such as, for example, the rating of the
governments. As in the realistic case, the individual decision making process
is determined by the most relevant personal interests and problems. The
phenomenological analysis of the national vote in Italy and Germany has been
carried out and a prediction of the next Italian vote as a function of the
government rating is presented.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. To be published in International Journal of Modern
Physics
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