Measuring culture and its dynamics through surveys has important limitations, but the emerging field of computational social science allows us to overcome them by analyzing large-scale datasets. In this paper, we study cultural dynamics through the votes in the Eurovision song contest, which are...

This special issue of Advances in Complex Systems presents a collection of selected papers of the 4th Conference of the European Social Simulation Association held in Tolulouse, France on 10–14 September 2007.

The volatility in a CPG market is modeled using a bottom-up simulation approach and validated against disaggregated supermarket transactions data. The simulation uses independent agents, each agent representing unique households in the data. A simple behavioral model incorporates household...

In this paper we present a first attempt to represent the social behavior of actors in a resource sharing context in such a way that different forms of solidarity can be detected and measured. We expect that constructing agent-based models of water-related interactions at the interface of urban...

The particle swarm algorithm uses principles derived from social psychology to find optimal points in a search space. The present paper decomposes and reinterprets the particle swarm in order to discover new ways of implementing the algorithm. Some essential characteristics of the method are...